Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (45 page)

He thus did not depart from the line laid down in his ‘liquidation’ speech, that Britain would hold her own but not seek new territory. Stalin claimed to favour ‘an increase in the British Empire, particularly the area around Gibraltar’, but Churchill failed to rise to the bait.
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Churchill’s dinner on the 30th passed off well, and the next day British and Indian troops, together with employees of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, gave him a birthday parade.
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On the final day of the conference, though, Roosevelt teased him mercilessly, to Stalin’s great enjoyment, ‘about his Britishness, about John Bull, about his habits’. By Roosevelt’s account, it was this that defrosted his relations with Stalin: ‘From that time on our relations were personal’.
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The whole experience was scarring for Churchill. ‘I realised at Teheran for the first time what a small nation we are’, he told a friend afterwards. ‘There I sat with the great Russian bear on one side of me, with paws outstretched [. . .] and on the other side the great American buffalo, and between the two sat the poor little British donkey, who was the only one of the three who knew the right way home.’
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The question of international trusteeship for colonial areas, raised in passing at Tehran, had been under official discussion in both Britain and the USA for some time. The pressure, of course, came from the latter, and the British discussions were much concerned with moderating any such proposals to the point of acceptability. The Cabinet Secretary’s notes record Churchill’s resentment of this: ‘Time taken off the war in order to find a formula to gratify the Americans. Why shd. we apologise? We showed the world a model of Colonial development.’ In his view, the only legitimate criticism was ‘that we haven’t spent enough in Colonies’.
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The Colonial Office strategy was to move the Americans away from the idea of a single world organization towards one of regional bodies, which might be less threatening to Britain’s interests; Churchill himself thought in terms of councils for Europe, the Americas and the Pacific, subordinate to a Supreme World Council.
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Scepticism about the American attitude was not confined to him. The US was keen to acquire bases in the Pacific and, whatever Roosevelt might say casually, had little intention of subjecting control of these to international oversight. It seemed to some that the Americans were all too ready to point the finger at the evils of European colonialism, while pursuing a covert neo-imperialist agenda of their own. American double standards were neatly exposed by Oliver Stanley (Colonial Secretary from 1942) in a conversation at the White House towards the end of the war. Roosevelt, criticizing Churchill’s ‘what we have we hold message’, told Stanley: ‘I do not want to be unkind or rude to the British but in 1841, when you acquired Hong Kong, you did not acquire it by purchase.’ Stanley immediately answered, ‘Let me see, Mr President, that was about the time of the Mexican War.’
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III

The Americans were not the only supporters of trusteeship, though. New Zealand’s Peter Fraser spoke up for it firmly at the conference of Dominion Prime Ministers in London in May 1944. He argued that reports on colonial administration should be submitted to and discussed by an international organization. Oliver Stanley and John Curtin both dissented (although Curtin was here at odds with the views of his colleague Evatt). Churchill blandly summarized the discussion by saying that much agreement had been reached.
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Blandness, in fact, was the keynote of the conference, although increasingly desperate German propagandists tried to portray the meeting as a ‘gathering round the death-bed of the imperial mother’.
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India was hardly mentioned.
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Curtin’s scheme for an imperial secretariat was quietly sidelined. With British ministers still at odds over international post-war economic issues, it was hard for Churchill to make much progress on these.
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A slight note of discord entered proceedings when the premiers discussed the proposed new international organization (the Dumbarton Oaks conference that was to lay the foundations for the UN took place later in the year). Churchill made it clear that he wished the British Empire as a whole to be represented on the new body, rather than for its component nations to have individual seats. Mackenzie King, backed by Smuts, faced down this centralizing plan. ‘It was the hardest battle of the conference thus far because it required very straight and direct talking to and differing from Churchill on the things he feels most deeply about’, noted King. ‘The truth is, he speaks of Communism, etc. being a religion to some people, the British Empire and Commonwealth is a religion to him.’
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There were also other tensions. The Australian government, facing a manpower crisis, wanted to release men from the forces in order to produce food (much of the country’s exports were needed by Britain). Churchill was angered by this. He felt that the Australian war effort was ‘a very poor show’, although his advisers were to provide him with evidence to the contrary. Meeting with Curtin at Chequers, Churchill refused to allow servicemen to return from Europe and the Middle East, although he did subsequently offer some concessions.
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Curtin also had other anxieties, but Churchill seems to have won him over completely.
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The
Canberra Times
reported, ‘The assurances of Mr Churchill have dispelled Australian fears that Britain might be disinclined to enter wholeheartedly in the Far Eastern struggles after the fall of Germany.’
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Actual British plans for this next stage remained unsettled, not least because of arguments in Whitehall about strategy. In spite of this, Curtin was eager, doubtless for domestic reasons, to obtain a public statement that they had been agreed. But when Mackenzie King, who knew this, pressed him to spell out what had actually been decided, the Australian used the words ‘The British Government is to consider what it is going to do.’ Mackenzie King was incredulous, and told Curtin sardonically, ‘I assumed they would wish Canada to take some part in the war against Japan and certainly our plans were not settled at all.’
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In Churchill’s mind Far Eastern problems naturally took a lower priority at this moment than the coming launch of Overlord. American troops had been massing in Britain for a long time, a new social fact that was the cause of much official introspection. The government failed in its efforts to persuade the Americans to restrict the numbers of black troops sent. (When the executive secretary of America’s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People cabled Churchill to ask if it was true that such a request had been made, he received no reply because it was impossible to give an honest denial.)
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Britain’s non-white population at this time was tiny. Nevertheless, there were those who felt that the British – with their experience of Empire – could teach the Americans – who maintained widespread segregation – a thing or two about race relations. Most ministers hoped that Britons could be persuaded to maintain a social distance from black soldiers, making formal segregation unnecessary. In October 1942 the question came up at Cabinet, when the War Secretary, P. J. Grigg, proposed that British soldiers should be ‘educated’ to adopt the racial attitudes of their white US counterparts. In response, Lord Cranborne pointed out the difficulties of what he called the ‘ “not too matey” principle’. Not only were significant numbers of black Canadians already present in Britain, but ‘If it can be said we have advocated “colour bar” all the coloured people here fr. our Empire will go back discontented and preach disaffection there.’
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He drew attention to the case of a black Colonial Office official who ‘had always lunched at a certain restaurant which now, because it was patronised by U.S. Officers, kept him out’. Churchill said, ‘That’s all right: if he takes a banjo with him they’ll think he’s one of the band!’
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The War Office largely got its way, and the government in effect colluded with the segregation maintained by the US army.

On 6 June 1944 the invasion of France began. By the end of that day 73,000 American and 83,000 British and Canadian troops had landed in Normandy.
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Within a few days the beachhead was secure enough for Churchill to make an inspection, together with Brooke and Smuts. (The latter’s tendency to support Churchill’s strategic ideas over those of the Americans doubtless added to his congeniality as a companion.) Victory in Europe, although requiring terrible sacrifices of human life, was now largely a matter of time. But when Churchill contemplated the future of the continent he was assailed by doubt. Should he beg Roosevelt to take a tougher line against resurgent Russia, or throw out the hand of friendship to Stalin instead?
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On his way to Canada for a further conference with Roosevelt in Quebec – codenamed ‘Octagon’ – he looked ‘old, unwell and depressed’.
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John Colville recorded, ‘The P.M. produced many sombre verdicts about the future, saying that old England was in for dark days ahead, that he no longer felt he had a “message” to deliver’.
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He was bucked up by his reception when his ship arrived at Halifax. After making a short speech he ‘led community singing, beating time with his cigar’. The crowd then broke into ‘God Save the King’.
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He was further buoyed by the news on 12 September that Canadian troops had taken Le Havre. At lunch with the President and others that day he spoke of India, blaming the famine on ‘the hoarding of food by the people themselves for speculative purposes’ and telling stories against Gandhi.
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Harmony at the conference was not absolute. Mackenzie King, again not included in the Anglo-US talks, was as concerned as ever about Churchill’s attempts at imperial centralization. Mackenzie King was adamant that although Canadian troops could fight the Japanese in the Central or Northern Pacific theatres, they should not do so in South-East Asia. He wrote: ‘Our people, I know, would never agree to paying out of taxes for Canadians fighting [. . .] for the protection of India, [and] the recovery of Burma and Singapore.’ He added: ‘I understand the Americans feel Singapore, Burma and all is a side-show to save the British prestige, and that there is a possibility of American troops actually conquering Japan before the conquest of Singapore might be effected.’
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Meanwhile, Churchill, who had held on to his obsession with Sumatra, plagued his own advisers with accusations that they were conspiring with the Americans against him.
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At the same time, though, he recognized the danger for post-war Anglo-American relations if Britain’s efforts against Japan appeared to be ‘limited to the pursuit of her own selfish interests in Burma, Malaya and Hong Kong’. Therefore he offered to send a fleet to the Central Pacific to operate under US command. This was opposed by the notoriously irascible Admiral King, US Chief of Naval Operations, who allegedly ‘did not want anyone else to intervene in his own pet war’. But Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s gesture without hesitation. ‘The British delegation heaved a sigh of relief, and the story went the rounds that Admiral King went into a swoon and had to be carried out.’
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Churchill described Octagon as a ‘blaze of friendship and unity’; certainly, it was an overall success from the British point of view.
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Beforehand, Roosevelt had been told of the full extent of Britain’s financial difficulties; he joked that the news was ‘very interesting [. . .] I will go over there and make a couple of talks and take over the British Empire’.
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In Quebec, though, he agreed that Lend-Lease should be continued during ‘Stage II’ – the period between the end of the war with Germany and the final defeat of Japan.
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It was a necessary but generous offer, contradicting the notion that the Americans never missed an opportunity to use their power to put their British allies in financial bondage. When Colville suggested to Churchill that the advantages obtained for Britain were beyond the dreams of avarice, he replied ‘Beyond the dreams of justice.’
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IV

But this last autumn of the war also brought its share of troubles. Churchill returned home to the news that the First Airborne Division had met its destruction at Arnhem. (Churchill nonetheless told Smuts that the battle had been ‘a decided victory’).
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Moreover, Churchill’s October conference in Moscow with Stalin was at best a partial success. On the way back, he dined in Cairo with his friend Lord Moyne, the British Minister-Resident in Cairo, who had served under him as a Treasury minister in 1924–5. It was the last time he would see him. On 6 November Moyne was returning home for lunch when two gunmen shot his driver dead and then fired through the car door at Moyne, hitting him three times. That same day, Churchill told the Cabinet ‘the bad news that an attempt had been made on Walter Moyne’s life, apparently by Jewish extremists, and that his condition was serious’. News of his death came that same evening.
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When arrested, the assassins confessed that they were from the group Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, formerly known as the Stern Gang.
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Moyne had not been devoid of sympathy for Zionism, but he had attracted the wrath of the militants in part through a speech in which he said that to force Arabs to live under a Jewish regime would be contrary to the Atlantic Charter.
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The Jewish Press in Palestine reacted to the crime with horror. ‘No enemy of the Jewish people could have done more to undermine the foundations upon which our work is reared than the murderers of Lord Moyne have contrived to do’, declared
Haaretz
. In its view, the killing was the work of a ‘tiny group’ which had ‘gone insane’.
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It was a view shared by the pro-Zionist Leo Amery, who wrote in his diary: ‘It is tragic that a man of such devotion to duty and kindliness to all men should be murdered by insane fanatics who have inflicted a possibly fatal injury on their own cause. If they had only known how helpful Walter has been in all the Palestine discussions in finding fair and workable lines of solutions.’
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