The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (347 page)

There it was. No American cruisers would be going to Cape Town to haul away Britain’s gold. Roosevelt would stand in as Churchill’s second in the great duel. To Greece, China, and Britain foremost would go several billions of dollars’ worth of tanks, clothing, food, guns, ammunition, and fuel. With crude oil priced at about $1.15 per barrel, a Colt .45 “tommy gun” at about $200, the newly tested half-ton reconnaissance car—the Jeep—at around $800, and new B-17s rolling off the line at $276,000 apiece, several billions of dollars’ worth of matériel would go a long way indeed.
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The president’s words—
if
they translated into congressional action—eased the most acute of Churchill’s financial worries, for an infusion of American matériel with costs deferred would buy time. Yet Roosevelt had spoken to matters far beyond merely buying time for Britain. He spoke to America’s future, with profound consequences for Churchill and the British Empire. His address has been known since as the “Four Freedoms” speech, in reference to the four moral precepts he attached to the end, a caboose that evolved into a locomotive. The address was a sublime statement of American generosity and American democratic ideals. It contained no mention of Churchill and, but for two offhand references to the British navy, no reference to the British Empire. To those who might reasonably seek a moral basis for aiding nations arrayed against Japan and Germany, to those who asked why this largess, Roosevelt offered his “Four Freedoms”:

Franklin Roosevelt had pushed open an imposing portal that America would never, could never, close. He did not immediately step through. He and America were not prepared. Yet he had announced his intent to remake the world in America’s image.
“Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them”
is an absolute statement that admits to no moral relativism and cannot be applied on a sliding scale. Roosevelt usually favored building coalitions, yet he had just made a case for unilateralism in the propagation of freedom.

He had made plain that dictators would not be tolerated in this new world order. He decreed that the Four Freedoms held everywhere. Yet “the democracies” he pledged to support included Greece, run by a dictator, and China, run by the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek. And what of empires of the democratic, liberal, British variety? Here, Roosevelt was silent. In Churchill’s world, “empire” and “freedom” were interchangeable, if the empire in question was the British Empire. Not so in Roosevelt’s world, as Churchill would learn to his enormous consternation in the coming months and years. Of democratic rights, Roosevelt had not declared, “Our support goes to those who struggle to keep those rights.” Rather, he announced his intent to support those who struggle to
gain
or keep those rights. Yet within the British Empire such rights were granted by His Majesty’s Government. Within the British Empire, some who struggled to gain those rights—Louis Botha, Michael Collins, Gandhi—were considered terrorists.

Reaction to the address was predictable. The influential German newspaper
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
dismissed it as “Eccentric Arguments for a Lost Cause.” The
Chicago Tribune
took much the same position: Lend-Lease would prove “a bill for the destruction of the American Republic.”

Churchill’s wait was almost over. He would not see the actual wording of the Lend-Lease bill for four days, but, despite his uncertainty as to its specific content, he had heard enough to express his thanks to Roosevelt in a speech January 9, on the occasion of Lord Halifax’s imminent departure to Washington as the Crown’s new ambassador: “I therefore hail it as a most fortunate occurrence that in this awe-striking climax in world affairs there should stand at the head of the American Republic a famous statesman… in whose heart there burns the fire of resistance to aggression and oppression, and whose sympathies and nature make him the sincere and undoubted champion of justice and freedom, and of the victims of wrongdoing wherever they may dwell.”
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Halifax’s departure was eclipsed by the golden promises from Washington. Still, Churchill found much good to say about the repentant appeaser: “In Edward Halifax we have a man of light and leading, whose company is
a treat and whose friendship is an honor to enjoy,” a man who has “never swerved from the path of duty as he saw it shining out before him.” Halifax did not behold any prospects of luminous paths in his new position. He confided to Alec Cadogan that he felt the prime minister was trying to get rid of him. Cadogan had not the heart to tell Halifax that he was correct, or that he, Cadogan, thought the appointment “a grave mistake.” Then there was the matter of Halifax’s feelings about Americans. To Stanley Baldwin, Halifax wrote, “I have never liked Americans, except the odd ones. In the mass I have always thought them dreadful!” Yet Halifax embraced his new American duties with alacrity, and conducted them with wisdom and finesse.
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Churchill, in his send-off for Halifax, avoided any trip wires. In any case, he wasn’t speaking to those millions, nor directly to Roosevelt, but to Roosevelt’s good friend and adviser Harry Hopkins, who, just arrived in London, would surely hear of the kind words Churchill had spoken about his boss, sugary words that would no doubt be fresh in Hopkins’s mind when he lunched with Churchill the following day. And that was a good thing, for Churchill by now understood that Hopkins was no ordinary visitor.

Before the new partners could get down to the business of financing Britain’s war, Churchill had first to win over Hopkins, and Roosevelt had to fight a political battle. Roosevelt knew that no critic could with truth say Lend-Lease committed a single American soldier to the British cause. The president’s position, a slippery foothold on the truth, was that Lend-Lease would help guarantee only that Britain get the job done
without
American troops. Roosevelt had talked himself into a Harold Lloyd sort of pickle, out on a ledge with no place to go. He had to nudge America close enough to Churchill’s fight to make a difference, yet not so close as to be drawn over the edge. The last war and the sordid peace that followed (both of which looked to many Americans like sops to Old Europe) were fresh in Roosevelt’s memory. He was not a European patriot and in fact believed European spheres of influence led inexorably to European wars. If Roosevelt was to join Churchill’s cause, he knew that he must articulate new principles—his Four Freedoms—on which to base his proposed policies. Roosevelt truly believed that England defeated meant America threatened, that is, American
interests
threatened. Many in Congress did not. Yet the president and the Congress had plenty of time to work things out. America would not be rushed by anyone.

Churchill was “delighted” by the Lend-Lease bill, Colville told his diary on the eleventh, adding that Churchill considered Lend-Lease to be “a virtual
open declaration of war” or “at any rate an open challenge to Germany to declare war if she dares.” But the prime minister was well aware, too, of the sentiments of his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kingsley Wood, who told Colville on the tenth: “In view of this bill [Lend-Lease] it will be more difficult for us to resist the American tendency to strip us of everything we possess as payment for what we are about to receive.”
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As Lend-Lease was making its way through the U.S. House of Representatives and, if passed there, the U.S. Senate, Churchill knew he must keep his frustrations with American inertia private, and muzzle those of his many colleagues who bitterly protested the lease of the West Indian bases to America as amounting to the same sort of “capitulation” Britain had demanded of Turkey and China in the nineteenth century. Churchill understood that the sorry state of the American destroyers and the injury to national pride over the loss of West Indian bases were ultimately irrelevant. The real significance of Lend-Lease, for which he was effusively grateful, was that it brought America a step closer to war. Lend-Lease took shape not because Churchill had begged so effectively or had outfoxed Franklin Roosevelt—he had not—but because Roosevelt, in spite of tremendous political risk and strong popular dissent, considered it to be in America’s interest to aid Britain and, of more immediate political concern, judged his countrymen ready to join him in taking that step.
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Roosevelt knew that in defending Lend-Lease he must avoid any statement that bolstered the isolationist case. He had to focus more on the morality of the war than on the weapons Churchill needed, because without a national consensus on the former, the latter would never be manufactured in sufficient quantities to make any difference. In shepherding America to war, or at the least, to preparedness for war, he could not take too long or too heavy a step. He shanghaied Harvard University president James Conant into testifying in support of Lend-Lease before Congress and impressed upon him the need to address only what it authorized, not what it might portend, though failure to pass the bill would, Roosevelt argued, put America at risk of attack should Britain be defeated.

The isolationists did not buy any of it. Although they supported modest aid for Britain, Conant believed they wanted a guarantee that Lend-Lease “would not be a step toward America’s involvement in the war.” They would get no such guarantee even were Roosevelt in a giving mood, which he told Conant he was not. Yet Roosevelt had preempted the isolationists, who could not afford to appear weak on defense, nor could they criticize the self-evident Four Freedoms. Any attack in that quarter would engender as much support as an attack on motherhood. Still, they knew their countrymen. Vanquishing true and absolute Evil didn’t much cut it in 1941 America. Nor among the isolationist America Firsters did the Wilsonian
mandate that America “must make the world safe for democracy.” America had turned inward during the 1930s, properly so, claimed the isolationists, for danger lurked without.
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The isolationist argument was simple, and inflexible. Britain’s plight did not much move isolationists, because they saw Britain as everything America strove not to be: imperial, elitist, defined by class distinctions, made wealthy by virtue of taking goods from its colonies rather than by virtue of making goods at home. Could this realm, this distant island, this England, even be properly termed a democracy? Such were the questions Congress would debate. The isolationists prepared massive opposition, much of it centered on Churchill. In the minds of America Firsters, Churchill’s pledge to
never
negotiate an end to the war had lured Roosevelt into a cursed web.
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For many Americans, and not just the America Firsters, here was Old Europe at it again. Americans had gone over once before and received small thanks, had not even been repaid the money they loaned to defeat the Kaiser. Churchill understood this. He respected Americans enough to stay out of their debate, or at least to not enter it directly. Rather than try to inspire Americans, as he had his countrymen in 1940, he intended to inspire Hopkins.

C
hurchill knew that his people were willing to take the aerial punishment, but only as long as they believed something greater than aerial revenge upon German cities was forthcoming. Britons craved a real victory in the field against Hitler’s armies. A victory of any size would do, obtained in any fashion, and on any front. Still, although he had yet to deliver such a victory, a visit by Churchill to a wrecked neighborhood always brought cheers from the locals. Londoners, when they stuck tattered little Union Jacks into their piles of smashed bricks and snapped timbers, sent a statement of deadly purpose to Churchill. Churchill, in turn, with each appearance, told them that he heard them.

That year he toured every major industrial city and port in England, Scotland, and Wales. He liked to drop into airfields, barracks, AA emplacements, and coastal defenses, and hoist a toast to the defenders, preferably with whisky (“I like my tea cool and
yella
” he told a young officer who offered him a spot of tea during one such visit). If, when he was strolling along St. James’s Street on his way to business in Whitehall, a passing workman proffered a hand, he took it. He understood the need to be seen and heard by the people. He grasped the power of photographs to record visits
to blasted neighborhoods, such that every citizen who viewed the images felt as if their Winnie had visited their house and theirs alone.
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