The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (341 page)

In his letter to Roosevelt, Churchill moved on to the possibility of Japan’s grabbing the oil of the Dutch East Indies. There wasn’t much to say on the matter, and he said it quite forthrightly: “We have to-day no forces in the Far East capable of dealing with this situation should it develop.” Then, to point number seventeen: money. Churchill let loose. It was clear, he wrote, that the more rapidly the United States fulfilled Britain’s needs, the sooner Britain’s finances would collapse, until, “we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies…. It would be wrong in principle… if, at the height of this struggle, Great Britain were divested of all saleable assets, such that after the victory was won with our blood, civilization saved… we should stand stripped to the bone.” Reduced to its essence, the letter is more a moral argument than a financial plea. Churchill closed by telling—not asking—Roosevelt to “regard this letter not as an appeal for aid, but as a statement of the minimum action necessary to achieve our common goals.”
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Roosevelt had a great deal to chew on. He received Churchill’s letter while aboard the cruiser
Tuscaloosa
on a two-week vacation in the Caribbean, which included stops at some of America’s new (and Britain’s former) naval bases. As later related by Churchill, his “great friend” read and re-read the letter, “as he sat alone in his deck chair, and that for two days he did not seem to reach any conclusion. He was plunged in intense thought and brooded silently.” The brooding may have been a result of what Churchill made clear in his letter: Britain vanquished would leave the United States alone and unprepared for war, swayed by the isolationists into a mortally dangerous neutrality that could result in a U.S. accommodation with Hitler, a brokered peace both fatal and without honor.
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To avoid that outcome, Roosevelt had to find a way to help America’s proxy before the proxy went broke, or worse. He had been contemplating a possible solution to the problem for several months, urged on by his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, who had told him in an August letter that it would not reflect well on America if “Britain went down” and America had not sent destroyers to prevent an invasion. Ickes added a homey analogy: “It seems to me that we Americans are like the householder who refuses to lend or sell his fire extinguisher to help out the fire in the home that is next door, although the house is all ablaze and the wind is blowing from that direction.” By the time Roosevelt arrived back in Washington
from his Caribbean vacation, he thought he had found his legal basis for funneling aid to Britain. It came by way of an obscure federal law that allowed the U.S. military to
lease
property not required for public use. On December 17—without offering any details of what he was pondering—Roosevelt told reporters (for the purpose of publication but without naming the source) of his struggle to find a way to help Britain. He told them, “What I am trying to do is to eliminate the dollar sign.” Then he offered a variation on Ickes’s parable: “Suppose my neighbor’s house is on fire and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up to his hydrant, I may help him to put out the fire…. I don’t say to him… ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.’ No!… I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.” A reporter asked, “Mr. President, before you loan your hose to your neighbor you have to have the hose.” The reporter went on to point out that if British orders for goods could be met only by second and third shifts at American factories, no federal authority was in place to mandate that factories add those shifts. They were fair points; America could not help Britain while running on one shift. Roosevelt avoided mention of the fact that the neighbor in this case needed not only the hose but an army of firemen as well.
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On December 12, Lord Lothian, who had been instrumental for more than a year in pleading Britain’s case to Americans, died suddenly in Washington. When taken ill, Lothian, a Christian Scientist, refused medical attention. “What a monstrous thing,” Churchill exclaimed, “that Lothian should not have allowed a doctor to be called.” Lothian’s death, coming the very week Roosevelt was pondering Churchill’s letter, created a political vacuum in Washington at the worst possible moment. Churchill needed to appoint a new ambassador, and fast. He liked Lloyd George for the job, but only, he told Colville, “if he could trust him.” Were Lloyd George to prove disloyal, Churchill added, “he could always sack him.” But the ambassadorship would place the former prime minister under Halifax, which Colville argued “would be an obstacle from L.G.’s point of view.” On the other hand, if Halifax went to Washington, yet another former appeaser would have been exiled. Churchill drafted Halifax. “His high character was everywhere respected,” Churchill later wrote, “yet at the same time his record in the years before the war and the way in which events had moved left him exposed to much disapprobation and even hostility from the Labour side of our National Coalition.” Churchill told Colville that if Halifax remained in Britain he “would never live down the reputation for appeasement” and that he “had no future in this country.” Without the United States in the war, Churchill told him, the very best
Britain could hope for was an unsatisfactory peace and that he, Halifax, “had a glorious future in America” if he proved successful in getting the United States in.
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In the final weeks of the year, while Roosevelt pondered his congressional strategy, Churchill could not do much more than watch as London burned, and ponder two questions: What exactly were the Americans going to do and when? And where was Hitler going to go and when? Spain and Gibraltar had been a source of angst for months. Ultra recently divined a German operation code-named Felix, about which nothing was known beyond the name. Churchill thought Felix might entail a strike into Ireland or Spain. He thought Spain more likely, he told Colville, because that’s where he would go if he were Hitler. That is exactly where Hitler sought to go, but Franco, in power largely through the sponsorship of Hitler and Mussolini, demurred. If Gibraltar was to be taken, Franco told Hitler, it would be taken by Spanish troops, not by a coalition of Germans and Spanish.
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In fact, the
generalissimo
had no intention of attacking Gibraltar. Spaniards were kept alive by food imports that Britain allowed to arrive only because Spain remained neutral. Franco understood that were he to allow Germans passage to Gibraltar, London would starve Spain by blockade. Thus, despite his debt to Hitler, he thought it best to forestall Hitler’s call to arms. In fact, he thought it best to sit this war out. Churchill, in late November, had telegrammed a warning to Roosevelt about the danger of losing Gibraltar and suggested that Roosevelt offer Franco “food month by month so long as they keep out of the war.” If Gibraltar were lost, Churchill told Roosevelt, it “would be a grievous addition to our naval strain, already severe.”
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Gibraltar corked would trap the entire British Mediterranean fleet in the bottle, but only if the Suez Canal was corked as well. Franco, wily and possessed of a sense of global strategy that Hitler lacked, told the Führer that if Germany took the Suez Canal, Spain would then take Gibraltar. The German grand admiral Raeder, who understood very well the centricity of naval power to Britain’s status as a world power, had long grasped the importance of the Suez to London, and had tried in September to convince Hitler to pursue the same strategy. Taking Gibraltar
and
the Suez, Raeder argued, would open pathways to the Middle East and make “doubtful whether an advance against Russia from the north will be necessary.” Churchill did not know that on the thirteenth of December, Hitler had canceled Felix, or that on December 18, he had signed a directive that began: “The German armed forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign before the end of the war against Britain.” Preparations were to be completed by May 15. The operation was code-named Barbarossa.
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C
hurchill later wrote that when the Germans massed on the French and Belgian frontiers in May of 1940, and then cascaded across, he grasped that “we were about to learn what total war means.” Indeed, total war had come to France, and was being waged in the Atlantic, and in the skies over England. But in December 1940, the status of life in much of continental Europe—and in Manchuria and the Horn of Africa—was more of a gruesome peace brokered by bayonet than total war.

Stalin, having the previous year partnered with Hitler in the obliteration of Poland, was digesting his Baltic, Finnish, and Romanian territorial takeovers. In December, Stalin’s most trusted lieutenant, Soviet foreign minister Molotov, returned from Berlin after negotiations with Ribbentrop over how best to share the spoils, including the carcass of the British Empire. Churchill called Molotov “a man of outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness” whose very survival within the Bolshevik world of lies, insults, intrigue, and the always present threat of “personal liquidation” fitted him out “to be an agent and instrument” of a leader such as Stalin. Yet in Hitler, Stalin and Molotov encountered a better liar and a more ruthless, more cold-blooded intriguer. Though in December Hitler faced his armies to the west, his vision had already turned to the east.
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In the Far East, the Japanese had begun the tenth year of their Manchurian depredations, enslaving the populace in the name of pan-Asian solidarity. “China,” Churchill wrote in 1937, “is being eaten by Japan like an artichoke, leaf by leaf.” Now, the fourth year of the Sino-Japanese war found a frontline stalemate between Chinese general Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist troops and Japanese general Hideki Tojo’s invading armies. Behind the Japanese lines, 400,000 of Mao Zedong’s Communist troops were making the emperor pay dearly for Chinese real estate. Japan’s moderate prime minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, found himself trying to appease Tojo’s war party, which believed in purchasing empire by brute force. If Konoye emerged from the political intrigue with more power, the greater Pacific region might yet live in peace. If Tojo proved stronger, a pan-Pacific war was most certainly inevitable, though Churchill stuck to his long-held premise that Japan would think twice before mixing it up with a power as mighty as Great Britain.
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Germany, Japan, and Italy had signed the Tripartite Pact in Berlin, on September 27, which pledged support for any signatory who was attacked by a power not already at war with the signatories. By doing so, the Axis arrayed itself against the rest of the world. Churchill later wrote that the
agreement “opened wider fields,” but the Tripartite Pact posed a conundrum for Churchill concerning the Burma Road. The road wound seven hundred tortuous miles from Lashio, a Burmese railhead four hundred miles north of Rangoon, to Kunming, in Yunnan Province, China, and was absolutely vital to the supply of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist army. The British had closed it in August, Alec Cadogan wrote, in an agreement with Japan that “special efforts be made to produce a lasting peace in the Far East.” Japan had made no such effort, special or otherwise, because Japan was dealing from strength. The Imperial Japanese army and navy, fueled in large part by the importation of seven million barrels a year of American oil, could go anywhere they pleased in order to make good on their threats. Nearly three months later, in October, the Burma Road was reopened, but the question was, how would Japan react? If Tokyo responded with force, what would Italy and Germany do? Attack England (again)? And what would America do?
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With those questions in mind, and with no military means available to dissuade the Japanese from mischief, Churchill cabled Roosevelt and asked for a bit of show-the-flagmanship in the Pacific, a friendly visit by an American naval squadron—“the bigger the better”—to Singapore, to help persuade the Japanese to behave. That such a display of American sea power might provoke the Japanese to a warlike response against the Americans certainly occurred to Churchill, because he understood the true intent of the Tripartite Pact.
Not already at war
was the key concept of the pact, unmasking it as a transparent attempt by the Axis to forestall intervention by the only nation of import not yet at war: the United States. As Churchill saw it, an American fleet cruising menacingly across the Japanese sea routes to Malayan rubber and Indonesian oil might be just the ticket to get the United States into the war. The U.S. fleet made no such foray.
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The United States all year had been in no mood for handling any hot potatoes tossed its way by Churchill. Navy chief admiral Harold (“Betty”) Stark wanted to keep his ships safe at Pearl Harbor, not send them traipsing about the Singapore Strait in support of Churchill’s empire. Even if willing, America wasn’t ready. The United States was still struggling out of the Depression, half aware of the coming storm and not half prepared to deal with it. America was willingly isolated in a state of blissful peace, the blush of renewed economic prosperity on the horizon. No mere three-way Axis deal could keep America out of war if that peace was disturbed; nor could Churchill’s pleas bring America into it if it was not. America was not entirely oblivious to far-flung events, or at least European events. The most listened-to broadcast of 1940 had been Roosevelt’s “dagger in the back” speech. Millions of Italian-Americans still thought Il Duce a stand-up guy. Americans knew old Europe, from where their parents had come, but the
Pacific was another story. Dozens of islands—Guam, Corregidor, Wake, Midway, Guadalcanal—were terra incognita to most Americans. Not until the final weeks of 1941 would they—and most Britons—know just where Pearl Harbor was located.
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America was re-arming, after a fashion. With an eye toward strengthening its global presence, the U.S. Navy (at 160,000 officers and men, smaller than both the Italian and German navies) ordered eight new aircraft carriers. Delivery was specified for 1945. The army, an anemic force of 500,000 (if the National Guard was included) field-tested its tough new General Purpose vehicle, GP for short. The GOP’s nomination of Wendell Willkie, rather than the isolationist Robert Taft, to run against Roosevelt had sent a subtle message to the world that neither American political party had completely buried its head in the sands of isolation. Roosevelt signed into law America’s first peacetime draft bill, a call-up of 800,000 men to serve for one year. Without once using the word “draft” when announcing the law, he termed it the revival of “the three-hundred-year-old American custom of the muster.” If his ongoing pledges that American boys would not be fighting in any overseas wars was to be taken at face value, an obvious question arose: Where in the world
would
800,000 mustered men serve?
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Since May, Churchill had wrangled, pestered, and beseeched Roosevelt to join him in his battle for Britain’s survival, without success. His missives to Roosevelt were, on the surface, full of facts and figures concerning British air and sea losses, arms production, and finances, yet, with the exception of his long December 7 letter, they are similar in voice to the letters that nine-year-old Winston wrote from St. George’s School, seeking the approval of his mother and father. Churchill recalled that, as a boy, his father seemed to him “to own the key to everything or almost everything worth having.” Roosevelt held that key in 1940.
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Churchill had gained the heights of power only to gaze down upon a nation at its military nadir. He was the defender of a realm that quite possibly would soon prove defenseless. RAF successes against Göring—limited and by no means guaranteed to continue—served up a meager and teasing hope of future victory. These were the months about which Churchill later wrote that it was “equally good to live or die.” During those December days, a prediction Churchill made after witnessing the French disaster seemed as likely to be fulfilled as not: in mid-June, on his last flight from France, he had turned to Ismay and asked, “Do you realize we probably have a maximum of three months to live?” Those three months were now coming up on six, but absent an ally, the months gained were simply a stay of execution. Britain’s finest hour had given way to its longest nights. The Germans had not arrived by sea, but when the Channel calmed in April and May, when the lilacs announced the coming of spring—and
Hitlerwetter—
surely the Germans would come. Yet, as he had since June, Churchill believed that if the Germans came, they would fail.
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O
n December 6, from the North African desert, came news that a British imperial army was on the march, and, unlike the BEF in June, this army was marching forward. Just after midnight, Operation Compass—Wavell’s plan to push the Italians out of western Egypt—began when British troops, tanks, and trucks departed Mersa Matruh and headed west, toward the seven Italian camps anchored at Sidi Barrani, seventy-five miles and a two-day march distant. Mersa Matruh, an azure sea to its front, stone cliffs rising around the town on the landward sides, had been an active port and sponge-fishing center since before the Greeks first came to Cyrene (modern Libya) almost twenty-six centuries earlier. It was from here in around 500
BCE
that the Persian forces of Cambyses II turned into the desert, in search of the oasis of Siwa, about two hundred miles south, and the first stop on the ancient caravan route to the Sudan. Cambyses and his entire army disappeared somewhere in the desert, perhaps in the great Sand Sea to the southwest, perhaps in the Qattara Depression, an enormous and lifeless bed of salt and sand fifty miles wide, two hundred miles long, and, at more than four hundred feet below sea level, one of the most hellish geographical features on the planet. Alexander the Great, also in search of Siwa, followed the route of Cambyses in 331
BCE.
After nearly meeting the Persians’ fate, the Macedonian finally made it to the oasis, where the oracle of Zeus Ammon confirmed that the young warrior was indeed of divine ancestry. Alexander departed, sure of his destiny, and conquered the world. Three centuries later, the divine Cleopatra and her lover Anthony favored Mersa Matruh (then named Paraetonium) for frolics in the surf, and elsewhere.