Closing the Ring (17 page)

There was so much to say and not to say in the broadcast that I could not think of anything, so my mind turned constantly to the Lake of the Snows, of which glittering reports had already come in from those who were there. I thought I might combine fishing by day with preparing the broadcast after dark. I resolved to take Colonel Clarke at his word, and set out with my wife by car. I had noticed that Admiral Pound had not gone with the other two Chiefs of Staff to the lake, and I suggested that he should come with us now. His Staff officer said that he had a lot of cleaning up to do after the Conference. I had been surprised by the subdued part he had taken in the far-ranging naval discussions, but when he said he could not come fishing, I had a fear that all was not well. We had worked together in the closest comradeship from the first days of the war. I knew his worth and courage. I also knew that at home he would get up at four or five in the morning for a few hours’ fishing before returning to the Admiralty whenever he saw the slightest chance. However, he kept to his quarters and I did not see him before starting.

We had a wonderful all-day drive up the river valley, and after sleeping at a rest-house on the way my wife and I reached
the spacious log cabin on the lake. Brooke and Portal were leaving the next day. It was just as well. They had caught a hundred fish apiece each day, and had only to continue at this rate to lower the level of the lake appreciably. My wife and I sallied forth in separate boats for several hours each day, and though we are neither of us experts we certainly caught a lot of fine fish. We were sometimes given rods with three separate hooks, and once I caught three fish at the same time. I do not know whether this was fair. We did not run at all short of fresh trout at the excellent meals. The President had wanted to come himself, but other duties claimed him. My aide-de-camp, Mary, had been invited to address an important gathering of American W.A.C.s at Oglethorpe, and was flown off accordingly. The President sent me the following:

President to Colonel Warden

27 Aug. 43

Wednesday the first is all right in every way [for Washington]. If Subaltern [Mary] wants to go to Oglethorpe, it would give her more time in Washington if she were to come down a day or two ahead. I hope Lady Warden is getting a real rest, and that you are also. Also I hope you have gone to One Lake.
¹
Be sure to have big ones weighed and verified by Mackenzie King.

  I sent the biggest fish I caught to him at Hyde Park. The broadcast made progress, but original composition is more exhausting than either arguing or fishing.

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We returned to Quebec for the night of the 29th. I attended another meeting of the Canadian Cabinet, and at the right time on the 31st, before leaving for Washington, I spoke to the Canadian people and to the Allied world. A few quotations are pertinent to this account.

  The contribution which Canada has made to the combined effort of the British Commonwealth and Empire in these tremendous
times has deeply touched the heart of the Mother Country and of all the other members of our widespread family of states and races.

From the darkest days the Canadian Army, growing stronger year by year, has played an indispensable part in guarding our British homeland from invasion. Now it is fighting with distinction in wider and ever-widening fields. The Empire Air Training Organisation, which has been a wonderful success, has found its seat in Canada, and has welcomed the flower of the manhood of Great Britain, of Australia, and New Zealand to her spacious flying-fields and to comradeship with her own gallant sons.

Canada has become in the course of this war an important sea-faring nation, building many scores of warships and merchant ships, some of them thousands of miles from salt water, and sending them forth manned by hardy Canadian seamen to guard the Atlantic convoys and our vital life-line across the ocean. The munitions industries of Canada have played a most important part in our war economy. Last, but not least, Canada has relieved Great Britain of what would otherwise have been a debt for these munitions of no less than two thousand million dollars.

All this of course was dictated by no law. It came from no treaty or formal obligation. It sprang in perfect freedom from sentiment and tradition and a generous resolve to serve the future of mankind. I am glad to pay my tribute on behalf of the people of Great Britain to the great Dominion, and to pay it from Canadian soil. I only wish indeed that my other duties, which are exacting, allowed me to travel still farther afield and tell Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans to their faces how we feel towards them for all they have done, and are resolved to do. …

We have heard a lot of talk in the last two years about establishing what is called a Second Front in Northern France against Germany. Anyone can see how desirable that immense operation of war would be. It is quite natural that the Russians, bearing the main weight of the German armies on their front, should urge us ceaselessly to undertake this task, and should in no way conceal their complaints, and even reproaches, that we have not done it before. I do not blame them at all for what they say. They fight so well, and they have inflicted such enormous injury upon the military strength of Germany, that nothing they could say in honest criticism of our strategy or the part we have so far been able
to take in the war would be taken amiss by us, or weaken our admiration for their own martial prowess and achievement. We once had a fine front in France, but it was torn to pieces by the concentrated might of Hitler; and it is easier to have a front pulled down than it is to build it up again. I look forward to the day when British and American liberating armies will cross the Channel in full force and come to close quarters with the German invaders of France. … Personally, I always think of the Third Front as well as the Second Front. I have always thought that the Western democracies should be like a boxer who fights with two hands and not one.

I believe that the great flanking movement into North Africa, made under the authority of President Roosevelt and of His Majesty’s Government, for whom I am a principal agent, will be regarded in the after-time as quite a good thing to do in all the circumstances. Certainly it has reaped rich and substantial results. Africa is cleared. All German and Italian armies in Africa have been annihilated, and at least half a million prisoners are in our hands. In a brilliant campaign of thirty-eight days Sicily, which was defended by over four hundred thousand Axis troops, has been conquered. Mussolini has been overthrown. The war impulse of Italy has been destroyed, and that unhappy country is paying a terrible penalty for allowing itself to be misled by false and criminal guides. How much easier it is to join bad companions than to shake them off! A large number of German troops have lately been drawn away from France in order to hold down the Italian people, in order to make Italy a battle-ground, and to keep the war as distant and as long as possible from German soil. By far the greater part of the German Air Force has been drawn off from the Russian Front, and indeed is being engaged and worn down with ever-growing intensity, by night and day, by British and American and Canadian airmen. More than all this, we have established a strategic initiative and potential, both from the Atlantic and from the Mediterranean, of which the enemy can neither measure the weight nor foresee the hour of application.

To judge by the latest news from the Russian battle-fronts, Marshal Stalin is certainly not wasting his time. The entire British Empire sends him our salutes in this brilliant summer campaign, and on the vitories of Orel, Kharkov, and Taganrog, by which so much Russian soil has been redeemed and so many hundreds of thousands of its invaders wiped out.

I gave the fullest prominence to Mountbatten’s appointment.

  A Supreme Commander of the Southeast Asia front has been chosen, and his name has been acclaimed by British, American, and Chinese opinion. He will act in constant association with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. It is true that Lord Louis Mountbatten is only forty-three. It is not often under modern conditions and in established military professions that a man gets so great a chance so early. But if an officer, having devoted his life to the military art, does not know about war at forty-three, he is not likely to learn much more about it later on. As Chief of Combined Operations Lord Louis has shown rare powers of organisation and resourcefulness. He is what—pedants notwithstanding—I will venture to call a “complete triphibian”—that is to say, a creature equally at home in three elements, earth, air, and water, and also well accustomed to fire. We all wish the new command and its commander full success in their novel, varied, and certainly most difficult task.

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I left Quebec by train, and arrived at the White House on September 1. Throughout the talks at Quebec, events had been marching forward in Italy. The President and I, as has been recorded elsewhere, had directed during these critical days the course of the secret Armistice talks with the Badoglio Government, and had also been following anxiously and closely the military arrangement for a landing on Italian soil. I deliberately prolonged my stay in the United States in order to be in close contact with our American friends at the critical moment in Italian affairs. On the day of my arrival in Washington, the first definite and official news was received that Badoglio had agreed to accept the surrender terms proposed by the Allies. The strategic arrangements debated at Quebec had of course been considered in the light of the possible Italian collapse, and this aspect was our main concern in these days.

While in Washington I attended several American Cabinets or their equivalent and was in close touch with leading American personalities. Poor Hopkins at this time was very ill and had to retire for a complete rest to the Naval Hospital. The President was very anxious for me to keep a longstanding appointment
and receive an honorary degree at Harvard. It was to be an occasion for a public declaration to the world of Anglo-American unity and amity. On September 6, I delivered my speech. The following extract may be printed here.

  To the youth of America, as to the youth of Britain, I say, “You cannot stop.” There is no halting-place at this point. We have now reached a stage in the journey where there can be no pause. We must go on. It must be world anarchy or world order. Throughout all this ordeal and struggle which is characteristic of our age you will find in the British Commonwealth and Empire good comrades to whom you are united by other ties besides those of state policy and public need. To a large extent they are the ties of blood and history. Naturally I, a child of both worlds, am conscious of these.

Law, language, literature—these are considerable factors. Common conceptions of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice, and above all the love of personal freedom, or, as Kipling put it, “Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law”—these are common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking peoples. We hold to these conceptions as strongly as you do.

We do not war primarily with races as such. Tyranny is our foe. Whatever trapping or disguise it wears, whatever language it speaks, be it external or internal, we must for ever be on our guard, ever mobilised, ever vigilant, always ready to spring at its throat. In all this we march together. Not only do we march and strive shoulder to shoulder at this moment, under the fire of the enemy on the fields of war or in the air, but also in those realms of thought which are consecrated to the rights and the dignity of man.

I spoke about our Combined Staffs.

  At the present time we have in continual vigorous action the British and United States Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee, which works immediately under the President and myself as representative of the British War Cabinet. This Committee, with its elaborate organisation of Staff officers of every grade, disposes of all our resources, and in practice uses British and American troops, ships, aircraft, and munitions just as if they were the resources of a single state or nation. I would not say there are never divergences of view among these high professional authorities. It would be unnatural if there were not. That is why it is necessary to have plenary meetings of principals every two or three months. All these men now know each other. They trust each other. They like each other, and most of them have been at work together for a long time. When they meet, they thrash things out with great candour and plain, blunt speech, but after a few days the President and I find ourselves furnished with sincere and united advice.

This is a wonderful system. There was nothing like it in the last war. There never has been anything like it between two allies. It is reproduced in an even more tightly knit form at General Eisenhower’s Headquarters in the Mediterranean, where everything is completely intermingled and soldiers are ordered into battle by the Supreme Commander or his Deputy, General Alexander, without the slightest regard as to whether they are British, American, or Canadian, but simply in accordance with the fighting need.

Now in my opinion it would be a most foolish and improvident act on the part of our two Governments, or either of them, to break up this smooth-running and immensely powerful machinery the moment the war is over. For our own safety, as well as for the security of the rest of the world, we are bound to keep it working and in running order after the war—probably for a good many years, not only until we have set up some world arrangement to keep the peace, but until we know that it is an arrangement which will really give us that protection we must have from danger and aggression, a protection we have already had to seek across two vast world wars.

Alas, unwisdom has already prevailed.

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I had, as usual, had an official summary of the Conference sent to the Dominion Prime Ministers. Field-Marshal Smuts was disappointed by the scale on which our plans were based, and also by their apparent leisurely time-table. I always, as the reader knows, found great comfort in feeling that our minds were in step. The cables that passed between us throw
a true and intimate light upon the main issues of the war at this milestone. It was no burden to me but a relief to dictate from my general body of knowledge acquired at the summit full explanations to one I knew so well.