Finest Years (24 page)

For many years after 1945, the democracies found it gratifying to perceive the Second World War in Europe as a struggle for survival between themselves and Nazi tyranny. Yet the military outcome of the contest was overwhelmingly decided by the forces of Soviet tyranny, rather than by Anglo-American armies. Perversely, this reality was better understood by many contemporary British people than it has been by their descendants.

Throughout 1941, even after torrents of blood began to flow across the plains of Russia, Churchill's foremost priority remained the enlistment of the US as a fighting ally. As he followed the fortunes of Britain's desert battles, the pursuit of the
Bismarck
, Atlantic convoy struggle, campaign in Greece and faltering bomber offensive, his American vision dominated the far horizon. Unless or until the US joined the war, Britain might avert defeat, but could not aspire to victory. Among Churchill's priceless contributions to Britain's salvation was his wooing of the USA, when many of his compatriots were rash enough to indulge rancour towards what they perceived as the fat, complacent nation across the Atlantic. ‘
I wonder if the Americans
realise how late they are leaving their intervention,' wrote John Kennedy in May 1941, ‘that if they wait much longer we may be at the last gasp.' In a notable slip of the tongue, a BBC announcer once referred to the threat of ‘American' rather than ‘enemy' parachutists descending on Britain.

It would be hard to overstate the bitterness among many British people, high and low, about the United States's abstention from the struggle. The rhetoric of Roosevelt and Churchill created an enduring myth of American generosity in 1940-41. Cordell Hull, the Secretary of State, wrote of ‘
rushing vast quantities
of weapons to Britain in the summer of 1940'. In truth, however great the symbolic importance of early US consignments, their practical value was small.

American-supplied artillery and small arms were obsolete, and made a negligible contribution to Britain's fighting power. Aircraft deliveries in 1941 were moderate both in quantity and quality. The fifty old destroyers loaned by the US in exchange for British colonial basing rights were scarcely seaworthy: just nine were operational at the end of 1940, and the rest required long refits. Only from 1942 onwards, when Britain received Grant and Sherman tanks, 105mm self-propelled guns, Liberator bombers and much else, did US war material dramatically enhance the capabilities of Churchill's forces.

Moreover, far from guns, tanks and planes shipped across the Atlantic representing American largesse, until the end of 1941 these were cash purchases. Under the terms of the Neutrality Act imposed by Congress, no belligerent could be granted credit. For the first two years of the war the US reaped huge profits from arms sales. ‘
The United States Administration
is pursuing an almost entirely American policy, rather than one of all possible aid to Britain,' Eden wrote to Churchill on 30 November 1940. Roosevelt anticipated British bankruptcy, and adopted the notion of ‘loaning' supplies, an idea which originated with New York's Century Association, before Churchill asked him to do so. But the president was furious when Lord Lothian, in October 1940 still British ambassador in Washington, told American journalists: ‘Well boys, Britain's broke. It's your money we want.' There is doubt whether the ambassador used these exact words, but the thrust of his remarks was undisputed.

Roosevelt told Lothian there could be no suggestion of American subsidy until Britain had exhausted her ability to pay cash, for Congress would never hear of it. There was a widespread American belief in British opulence, quite at odds with reality. Amid the Battle of Britain, the US administration questioned whether Churchill's government had honestly revealed its remaining assets. Washington insisted upon an audited account, a demand British ministers found humiliating. Churchill wrote to Roosevelt on 7 December 1940, saying that if Britain's cash drain to the US continued, the nation would find itself in a position in which ‘
after the victory was won
with our blood and sweat, and civilization saved and the time gained
for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.'

In responding to Churchill, Roosevelt never addressed this point, and his evasion was significant. He acknowledged a strong US national interest in Britain's continued resistance—displaying extraordinary energy and imagination in moving public and congressional opinion—but not in its post-war solvency. American policy throughout the war emphasised the importance of strengthening its competitive trading position
vis-à-vis
Britain by ending ‘imperial preference'. The embattled British began to receive direct aid, through Lend-Lease, only when the last of their gold and foreign assets had been surrendered. Many British businesses in America were sold at fire-sale prices. The Viscose rayon-manufacturing company, jewel in the overseas crown of Courtaulds and possessing assets worth $120 million, was knocked down for a mere $54 million, because Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau insisted that the cash should be realised at a week's notice. New York bankers pocketed $4 million of this sum in commission on a riskless transaction. Shell, Lever Bros, Dunlop Tyre and British insurance interests were alike compelled to sell up their US holdings for whatever American rivals chose to pay. The governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, wrote in March 1941: ‘
I have never realised
so strongly as now how entirely we are in the hands of American “friends” over direct investments, and how much it looks as if, with kind words and feelings, they were going to extract these one after another.'

The British government exhausted every expedient to meet US invoices. The Belgian government-in-exile lent £60 million-worth of gold which had been brought out of Brussels, although their Dutch and Norwegian counterparts refused to sell gold for sterling. An American cruiser collected from Cape Town Britain's last £50 million in bullion. Lend-Lease came with ruthless conditions constraining British overseas trade, so stringent that London had to plead with Washington for minimal concessions enabling them to pay for Argentine meat, vital to feeding Britain's people. Post-war British
commercial aviation was hamstrung by the Lend-Lease terms. If Roosevelt's behaviour was founded upon a pragmatic assessment of political realities and protection of US national interests, only the imperatives of the moment could have obliged Churchill to assert its ‘unselfishness'. Whatever US policy towards Britain represented between 1939 and 1945, it was never that. ‘
Our desperate straits
alone could justify its terms,' wrote Eden about the first round of Lend-Lease.

Most of the British did not anyway care for their transatlantic cousins. Anti-Americanism was pronounced among the aristocracy. Halifax, whom Churchill dispatched to Britain's Washington embassy in December 1940, told Stanley Baldwin: ‘
I have never liked Americans
, except odd ones. In the mass I have always found them dreadful.' Lord Linlithgow, a fellow grandee who was viceroy of India, wrote to commiserate with Halifax on his posting: ‘
the heavy labour of toadying
to your pack of pole-squatting parvenus! What a country, and what savages those who inhabit it!' Halifax told Eden that he had proposed him as an alternative candidate for the ambassadorship: ‘
I only said
that I thought you might hate it a little less than myself!'

Installed at the embassy, the former Foreign Secretary endured much suffering in the service of Britain, not least during a visit to a Chicago White Sox baseball game in May 1941, at which he found himself invited to eat a hot dog. This was too much for the fastidious ambassador, who declined.
During a trip to Detroit
he was pelted with eggs and tomatoes by a group calling itself ‘The Mothers of America'. Oliver Harvey, Eden's private secretary, described the aloof Halifax's performance in his role as ‘
pretty hopeless
—the old trouble of being unable to make real personal contacts…All business in the U.S.A. is now transacted by telephoning and “poppingin”, both of which H can't abide. He only goes to see the President on business—and naturally usually to ask for things—he has never got on to a more intimate chat basis with him.' Dalton related a mischievous story that Halifax broke down and wept soon after his arrival in Washington, ‘
because he couldn't
get on with these Americans'.

Many Tory MPs shared the grandees' distaste for the US. Cuthbert Headlam, admittedly something of an old woman, wrote of Americans with condescension: ‘
They really are
a strange and unpleasing people: it is a nuisance that we are so dependent on them.' A Home Intelligence Report found ‘
no great enthusiasm
for the US or for US institutions among any class of the British people…There was an underlying irritation largely due to American “apathy”.' Fantastically, some British officers questioned whether it would be in Britain's interests for America to become a belligerent. Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, with the British Mission in Washington in April 1941, noted that some of his colleagues believed ‘it wouldn't really pay us for the US to be actively engaged in the war'. Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, later C-in-C of Bomber Command, wrote with characteristic intemperance about the difficulties of representing the RAF in Washington in 1941. It was hard to make progress, he said bitterly,

when one is dealing with
a people so arrogant as to their own ability and infallibility as to be comparable only to the Jews and the Roman Catholics in their unshakeable conviction that they alone possess truth. As to production generally out here. This country is now at a crossroads. Up to date they have had a damn fine war. On British dollars. Every last one of them. The result has been a magnificent boom after long years of black depression and despair…They lose no opportunity of impressing upon us individually how magnificently they are fighting (sic) and how inept, inefficient and idiotic and cowardly is our conduct of those few miserable efforts we ourselves are making in battle and in industry…Such production of war materials as has been achieved up to date has therefore been all to their profit and in no way to their inconvenience…They will come in when they think that we have won it. Not before. Just like they did last time. They will then tell the world how they did it. Just like they did last time.

If Harris's tone was absurdly splenetic, it was a matter of fact that Britain and France provided the surge of investment that launched America's wartime boom. In 1939, US gross national output was still
below its 1929 level. Anglo-French weapons orders and Anglo-French cash thereafter galvanised US industry, even before Roosevelt's huge domestic arms programme took effect. Between 1938 and the end of 1942 average income per family in Boston rose from $2,418 to $3,618, in Los Angeles from $2,031 to $3,469, admittedly boosted by inflation and longer working hours. It could be argued—indeed was, by the likes of Harris—that Britain exhausted its gold and foreign currency reserves to fund America's resurrection from the Depression.

In London, ministers and generals found it irksome to be required to lavish extravagant courtesies upon American visitors. Hugh Dalton grumbled about attending a party given at the Savoy by the
Sunday Express
for American broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing: ‘
It is just a little humiliating
, though we shall soon get more and more used to this sort of thing, that the majority of the Ministers of the Crown plus foreign diplomats, British generals and every kind of notability in the press world have to be collected to help to boost this, I am sure, quite admirable and well-disposed American broadcaster.' Dalton was disgusted when the guest of honour asked him blithely whether there were factions in Britain willing to make peace with Germany. Nor was such impatience confined to ministers. Kenneth Clark of the Ministry of Information suggested the need for a campaign against ‘
the average man's
…unfavourable view of the United States as being a country of luxury, lawlessness, unbridled capitalism, strikes and delays'.

The British were exasperated by American visitors who told them how to run their war, while themselves remaining unwilling to fight. A British officer wrote of Roosevelt's friend, the flamboyant Col. William ‘Wild Bill' Donovan: ‘
Donovan…is extremely friendly
to us & a shrewd and pleasant fellow and good talker. But I could not but feel that this fat & prosperous lawyer, a citizen of a country not in the war, & which has failed to come up to scratch even in its accepted programme of assistance, possessed very great assurance to be able to lay down the law so glibly about what we and other threatened nations should & sh[ou]ld not do.'

It is against this background of British resentment and even hostility towards the US that Churchill's courtship of Roosevelt must be perceived. The challenge he faced was to identify what D.C. Watt has called ‘
a possible America
', able and willing to deliver. This could only be sought through the good offices of its president. Churchill, least patient of men, displayed almost unfailing public forbearance towards the USA, flattering its president and people, addressing with supreme skill both American principles and self-interest. He was much more understanding than most of his countrymen of American Utopianism. On the way to Chequers one Friday night late in 1940, he told Colville ‘
he quite understood
the exasperation which so many English people feel with the American attitude of criticism combined with ineffective assistance; but we must be patient and we must conceal our irritation. (All this was punctuated with bursts of “Under the spreading Chestnut Tree”.)'

Churchill himself knew the United States much better than most of his compatriots, having spent a total of five months there on visits in 1895, 1900, 1929 and 1931. ‘This is a very great country, my dear Jack,' he wrote enthusiastically to his brother back in 1895, when he stopped by en route to the Spanish war in Cuba. ‘What an extraordinary people the Americans are!' He was shocked by the spartan environment of West Point Military Academy, but much flattered by his own reception there: ‘
I was…only a Second Lieutenant
, but I was…treated as if I had been a General.' During his December 1900 lecture tour he was introduced in New York by Mark Twain, and told an audience in Boston: ‘There is no one in this room who has a greater respect for that flag than the humble individual to whom you, of the city which gave birth to the idea of a “tea party”, have so kindly listened. I am proud that I am the natural product of an Anglo-American alliance; not political, but stronger and more sacred, an alliance of heart to heart.'