Finest Years (26 page)

The British historian Michael Howard, in 1941 a student at Oxford awaiting a summons to the army, has written: ‘
It is never very easy
for the British to understand that a very large number of Americans, if they think about us at all, do so with various degrees of dislike
and contempt…In the 1940s the Americans had some reason to regard the British as a lot of toffee-nosed bastards who oppressed half the world and had a sinister talent for getting other people to do their fighting for them.' Melville Troy was an American cigar importer living in London. Though he admired the fortitude of the British amid the blitz, he was deeply anxious to see his own country spared from its horrors: ‘
Personally I am very sorry
to see America turning her pruning hooks and ploughshares into implements of war, and wish we had a Woodrow Wilson to keep us out of it.' Many of Troy's fellow countrymen thought likewise.

There was much, much more British wooing to be done. The extravagant courtesies shown by the government to Harry Hopkins were outdone when Winant arrived as ambassador. He was met at Bristol by Brendan Bracken and the Duke of Kent. A special train took him to Windsor, where King George VI was waiting at the station. The monarch then drove Winant in his own car to the Castle. Never in history had a foreign envoy been received with such ceremony. Meanwhile, implementation of the Lend-Lease programme enlisted another key American player in Britain's cause. Averell Harriman, fifty-year-old son of a railroad millionaire, was a supremely gilded product of Groton and Yale, a polo player and skier, international banker and collector of Impressionist paintings, a cosmopolitan of considerable gifts. Roosevelt explained Harriman's new mission to reporters at the White House: ‘
As soon as the Lend-Spend
, Lend-Lease—whatever you call it—bill is perfected, more or less, he will go over and—Oh, I suppose you will ask all about his title, so I thought I would invent one…we decided it was a pretty good idea to call him an “Expediter”. That's a new one for you. I believe it is not in the diplomatic list or any other list. So he will go over as “Defense Expediter”.'

In the spring of 1941 Harriman became an important American advocate of aid to Britain. Nonetheless, in Washington Hopkins and Henry Stimson, the Secretary for War, remained the only prominent members of the administration wholeheartedly committed to such a policy. Other leading Americans remained sceptical. In the War
Department, US generals cloaked dogged resistance to shipping abroad arms that were needed at home in a mantle of complaints about allegedly amateurish British purchasing policy. One officer, contemptuous of the informality of the Hopkins mission, told Harriman: ‘
We can't take seriously
requests that come late in the evening over a bottle of port.'

Among chief of the army Gen. George Marshall's key subordinates there were deep divisions about the merits of participation in the war, and of the British as prospective allies. Some senior officers unashamedly reserved their admiration for the Germans. Maj.Gen. Stanley Embick was a former chief of the War Plans Division who had become sceptical about Churchill and his people during service in France in World War I. Now he believed that Britain's war effort would fare better if the country changed prime minister. He thought that US aid should stop far short of belligerency. Like his son-in-law, Major Albert Wedemeyer of the War Plans Division, Embick addressed every Anglo-American issue with a determination that his country should not be duped into pulling British chestnuts out of the fire. Maj.Gen. Charles ‘Bull' Wesson hated the British, because he had once been dispatched from Washington to London with a message for the chiefs of staff, and was kept waiting to deliver it. Raymond Lee wrote: ‘
He resented this so much
that it led to a wrangle and almost hatred on his part for the British, which he exploits at every opportunity. So small an act of discourtesy, either real or imagined, which took place many years ago, is having ill effects in the relations between the two countries today.'

By contrast Colonel
—soon to be lieutenant-general and a key figure in Marshall's team—Joseph McNarney, who had visited Britain, believed it was vital to American national security that Churchill's island should not fall. Marshall himself was less implacably hostile to the British than Embick, but in the summer of 1941, in the words of his biographer, ‘
If rather than when
continued to dominate his thinking about American involvement.' Nor was such caution confined to senior officers.
Time
and
Life
magazines interviewed US Army draftees, and reported their morale to be low. At a camp movie
night in Mississippi, men booed when FDR and Marshall appeared on a newsreel.

Averell Harriman was in no doubt that America should fight. But he departed for London on 15 March 1941 fearful that Roosevelt was still unwilling to lead the US anywhere near as far or fast as was necessary to avert a Nazi triumph: ‘
I was deeply worried
the president did not have a policy and had not decided how far he could go…The President obviously hoped that he would not have to face an unpleasant decision. He seemed unwilling to lead public opinion or to force the issue but [he] hoped…that our material aid would let the British do the job.' Few doubted that Roosevelt already stood among America's greatest presidents. But he was often also a notably cautious one.

Harriman noted in a memorandum of 11 March: ‘
I must attempt to convince
the Prime Minister that I, or someone, must convey to our people his war strategy or else he cannot expect to get maximum aid.' Like Hopkins, he was received in Britain on the reddest of carpets. He was met at Bristol by Commander ‘Tommy' Thompson, Churchill's administrative aide, who led him aboard a plane which took them straight to Chequers. Harriman's guest gift to Clementine Churchill was a box of tangerines, which she received with unfeigned gratitude. The envoy was enfolded in a warm prime ministerial embrace. Kathleen Harriman, who accompanied her father's mission, wrote to her sister: ‘
The PM is much smaller
than I expected and a lot less fat…and looks rather like a kindly teddy bear…I'd expected an overpowering, rather terrifying man. He's quite the opposite: very gracious, has a wonderful smile and isn't at all hard to talk to. He's got the kind of eyes that look right through you. Mother [Clementine] is a very sweet lady. She's given up her whole life to her husband and takes a back seat graciously. Everyone in the family looks upon him as God and she's rather left out.'

In London, Harriman established himself on the second floor of a Grosvenor Square building adjoining the US embassy, and was also given his own office at the Admiralty. Churchill invited him to attend the weekly meetings of the cabinet's Atlantic Committee.

Of Harriman's first eight weekends in Britain, he spent seven at Chequers, though like most American guests he found his sense of privilege tempered by dismay at the coldness of the house. Churchill convoyed him, like Hopkins, as a prize exhibit on his own travels around the country. Here, he told the British people, was a living earnest of America's commitment—the president's personal representative.

In private to Harriman, ‘
the PM bluntly stated
that he could see no prospect of victory until the United States came into the war'. If Japan attacked, said Churchill, the British naval base of Singapore would be at risk. At every turn the prime minister sought to balance his desire to convince Roosevelt that Britain was a prospective winner against the need to exert pressure by emphasising the threat of disaster if America held back. Harriman urged Churchill to bolster Britain's case by publishing details of its appalling shipping losses. Between February and April 1941, 142 ships totalling 818,000 tons had gone to the bottom, more than double the rate of sinkings in the early months of the war. At a Defence Committee meeting in May, Eden and Beaverbrook suggested that at least meat ship losses might be disclosed, to emphasise the gravity of the food situation. Churchill, with the support of several other ministers, opposed this, ‘
believing that we shall get
the Americans in by showing courage and boldness and prospects of success and not by running ourselves down'. Moreover, figures which privately frightened the British government would deal a shocking blow to domestic morale if they were revealed, and must provide a propaganda gift to Hitler.

Some Americans displayed a condescension which irked the recipients of their aid. Kathleen Harriman described British reluctance to enthuse about American Spam and cheese: ‘
The great difficulty is
re-educating the people,' she wrote to her sister. ‘They prefer to go hungry rather than change their feeding habits.' A Tory MP wrote: ‘
The idea of being our armoury
and supply furnishers seems to appeal to the Yanks as their share in the war for democracy…They are a quaint lot—they are told that if we lose the war they will be next on Hitler's list…and yet they seem quite content to leave the
actual fighting to us; they will do anything except fight.' Duff Cooper, as Minister of Information, told newspaper editors on 21 March 1941: ‘
The great thing is not to
antagonise the United States…When we offered the bases against the [fifty loaned] destroyers we imagined, in Winston's words, that we were exchanging “a bunch of flowers for a sugar cake”. But not at all. The Americans have done a hard business deal.' After Lend-Lease became operational Franks, British driver to US military attaché Raymond Lee, told his master that he noticed more goodwill towards Americans. ‘
Well, yes
,' agreed Lee sardonically. ‘Perhaps you might describe it that way, but it is only natural, don't you think, that for seven thousand million dollars—that's nearly a billion pounds—we ought to be entitled to a little bonhomie!' ‘Oh yes, sir, yes, sir, quite. That's just what I mean, sir. I should say there is quite a bit more bonhomie in the air, sir.' This was only half-true. Most British people considered that the US was providing them with minimal means to do dirty work that Americans ought properly to be sharing themselves.

The threat of Japanese aggression against the British Empire in the Far East dogged Churchill that summer of 1941. Germany was fully committed in Russia. Britain's land forces in North Africa seemed to have a real prospect of victory against the Italians and such German troops as Hitler could spare from the eastern front. But if Japan attacked, the strategic balance would once more be overturned. Cadogan, at the Foreign Office, wrote in July that Churchill was ‘
frightened of nothing
but Japan'. The prime minister expressed confidence that if Tokyo moved against the British Empire, the Americans would intervene. His ministers, generals and officials were much less convinced. It was a nightmare prospect, that Britain might find itself at war in the East while America remained neutral. Some thought it likely that Japan would join Germany's attack on Russia, rather than strike at Malaya. Eden asked Churchill what he would do in such an eventuality. The prime minister replied firmly that Britain would never herself initiate hostilities with Japan, unless the United States did so. Month after month of 1941, he sought to promote the illusion that Britain's war effort was viable and purposeful. In private,
however, he recognised its ultimate futility unless Roosevelt's nation came in with both feet.

That summer, countless hours were expended by British diplomats, staff officers and the prime minister himself, weighing and debating every subtlety of US behaviour and opinion. Few lovers expended as much ink and thought upon wartime correspondence as did the prime minister on his long letters to Roosevelt, sometimes dispatched twice or thrice weekly, in which he described the progress of Britain's war. He adopted a confiding tone, taking it for granted that the president shared his own, and his country's, purposes. He extended his courtship to the president's people. On 16 June, the award
in absentia
of an honorary doctorate from Rochester University, New York, inspired one of his finest radio broadcasts to Americans:

A wonderful story
is unfolding before our eyes. How it will end we are not allowed to know. But on both sides of the Atlantic we all feel—I repeat, all—that we are a part of it, that our future and that of many generations is at stake. We are sure that the character of human society will be shaped by the resolves we take and the deeds we do. We need not bewail the fact that we have been called upon to face such solemn responsibilities. We may be proud, and even rejoice amid our tribulations, that we have been born at this cardinal time for so great an age and so splendid an opportunity of service here below. Wickedness—enormous, panoplied, embattled, seemingly triumphant—casts its shadow over Europe and Asia. Laws, customs, and traditions are broken up. Justice is cast from her seat. The rights of the weak are trampled down. The grand freedoms of which the President of the United States has spoken so movingly are spurned and chained. The whole stature of man, his genius, his initiative, and his nobility, is ground down under systems of mechanical barbarism and of organized and scheduled terror.

Churchill's words moved many people in his audience. Yet in Washington, Halifax observed wearily that trying to pin down the Americans was like ‘
a disorderly day's rabbit-shooting
'. Roosevelt offered much to Britain—aircrew training, warship repair facilities, the loan of transports, an American garrison to replace British troops in Iceland, secret military staff talks throughout February and March, growing assistance to Atlantic convoy escorts. But still the US stood well short of belligerence. In July, Roosevelt's Draft Renewal Bill passed the House of Representatives by only one vote. Churchill hankered desperately for a meeting with the president. More than that, he persuaded himself that if such an encounter took place, it would presage a decisive change in the Anglo-American relationship.