The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (355 page)

Although the goal of the America Firsters was to create a fortress America immune from foreign attack and insulated from the perils of international intrigue, partisans like Wheeler and Kennedy knew that the most direct route to the hearts of American parents was not to explicate complex geopolitical scenarios but to cite the likelihood of their sons’ dying in defense of the old and corrupt imperial order. Wheeler’s point was unassailable in its logic: if America was dragged into war, American boys would die. All of them—Churchill, Roosevelt, even the America Firsters—expected the price of Britain’s survival to soon be calculated in U.S. dollars. The isolationists, though rankled by that prospect, could, just barely, live with it. But that the price of British survival might soon be calculated in U.S. lives was a calculus the isolationists simply could not abide. Churchill could.

In arguing his case for U.S. assistance, Churchill had to avoid, at all cost, any word or deed that smacked of imperialism, anything that would make Roosevelt’s task that much more difficult. To Halifax, he wrote, privately: “It is astonishing how this misleading stuff put out by Kennedy that we should do better with a neutral United States than with her warring at our side should have traveled so far.” Publicly, he could voice no such opinion. Hopkins had warned Churchill that Lend-Lease and the isolationists were Roosevelt’s battles to fight, that “any move on the part of Great Britain to suggest that the United States would eventually fight on the British side would be fatal” to Lend-Lease and the supplies Churchill so desperately needed.
¹²⁸

Churchill told Colville he found it discouraging that Roosevelt was being led by public opinion, but in fact, he understood that Roosevelt was
guiding the crowd in a direction of his choosing. This was real leadership, not cheap manipulation, for the herd could only arrive at the desired destination if the shepherd was a masterful shepherd. Churchill could not advise Roosevelt, nor could he interfere in the president’s shepherding. Given his personality and the power vested in him in Britain, this frustrated him, and he freely expressed that frustration to the War Cabinet, but never to Roosevelt. Keeping his counsel was not one of Churchill’s most dominant traits; the unsent messages to Roosevelt at the turn of the year are cases in point. That those communications remained unsent underscores another of his traits: the wisdom, when occasion demanded, to hold his tongue.
¹²⁹

Joe Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh testified against Lend-Lease. Lindbergh declined to draw any moral distinction between Germany and Britain and, in the tradition of Baldwin and Chamberlain, cautioned against provoking Germany. He stated several times he wanted neither Germany nor Britain to win, that “it would be a disaster for Europe” if either side won, a curious line of thought given that one side or the other would have to, someday, win. Of Hitler, he said: “I feel I should maintain a position of absolute neutrality.” He favored a negotiated end to the war rather than a British victory, which could only be obtained by invasion of Germany and would result in “prostration, famine, and disease” throughout Europe. America, he said, should not “police the world.”
¹³⁰

Joe Kennedy, hoping for reinstatement within Roosevelt’s inner circle, unleashed a weak and unassertive message that avoided any mention of Hitler and urged America to build up its own defense. Lend-Lease, Kennedy declared, posed some constitutional problems vis-à-vis abdication of congressional oversight in foreign affairs, but all in all, he considered aid to Great Britain a good thing. Then he voiced his true sentiments to newsmen, on background: A certain “anonymous American statesman” (almost certainly Kennedy) told the British writer John de Courcy that many Americans felt “the American people have been bamboozled” and that increased aid to Britain would “lead to inflation and bankruptcy for many of us.” The anonymous statesman resented the fact that those Americans who disagreed with Mr. Churchill were tagged as isolationists, “a word that has lost most of its meaning and has become a term of abuse.” His congressional appearance and anonymous sniping finished “Jittery Joe” politically.
¹³¹

In early February, James Conant made his interventionist plea before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a call against “acquiescing in silence to policies which might lead to the wiping out on this continent of the free way of life.” Conant termed the conflict less an imperialistic battle than a “religious war” waged “by picked men fanatically devoted to a philosophy
which denies all premises of our American faith.” And then Conant, one of Roosevelt’s leading science advisers, tossed in a cautionary aside, reminding the nation that the Fascists “are well armed by modern science.” Within days of testifying, Conant was on his way to London, sent by Roosevelt to ascertain just how well armed Britain was by modern science.
¹³²

The Chicago
Tribune
continued to editorialize against Roosevelt and Lend-Lease. Americans listened to the America Firsters, but they began to listen less and were moved by them even less. The isolationists, the writer and political commentator Walter Lippmann wrote, had “forced the United States to make a separate peace and to withdraw from all further association with the other democracies to keep the world safe for democracy.” Lend-Lease, he wrote, would ensure that “this country passes from large promises carried out slyly and partially by clever devices to substantial deeds openly and honestly avowed.”
¹³³

Roosevelt had been doing some substantial avowing. His “Arsenal of Democracy” speech had moved America. His “Four Freedoms” speech had moved the world. By late February, Gallup polls showed that 55 percent of Americans thought Britain worth saving and worth supplying. Churchill had sold Roosevelt, and Roosevelt had just about closed his sale with the Congress. Yet, Lend-Lease still lingered in the U.S. Senate, and Gallup polls throughout winter found that almost 80 percent of Americans were against sending an army overseas.

Curiously, in his memoirs Churchill fails to credit an instrumental voice, Edward R. Murrow, in bringing Americans on board his foundering vessel. As much as Churchill and Roosevelt used the new medium of radio to great effect in order to sell their views (it had been just seven years since Roosevelt made his first fireside chat), they knew they could not take to the airwaves too often or try to sell too hard. Fortunately for Churchill, Americans tuned their sets to CBS and Murrow, a newsman who possessed, Eric Sevareid wrote, “a hard core of integrity which the impact of no man however powerful or persuasive ever has chipped.” Murrow’s reports from London came straight from the heart, and went straight to the heart of the matter, so much so that Ed Murrow was one of the first people Harry Hopkins sought out upon his arrival in London. Murrow spoke of the plight of a people at war. He was, wrote Sevareid, “the greatest broadcaster by far in the English tongue” and “a Boswell-to-a-great-city” in whose broadcasts “one will never find a case of sentiment becoming sentimentality.” Murrow’s reportage, more so even than Churchill’s brilliant rhetoric, served to replace in (some) Americans the image of Britons as appeasers and imperialists with an image of them as courageous lovers of freedom. After a night of bombs, Murrow broadcast that as he “walked home at
seven in the morning, the windows in the West End were red with reflected fire, and the raindrops were like blood on the panes.” No America Firster could summon such imagery with such power for his cause.
¹³⁴

Yet Churchill understood America well enough to know that such imagery, no matter how powerful, was not enough to move America to war. When a luncheon guest at No. 10 suggested that the bombing of Athens by the Germans might prove “a good thing from our point of view as it would shock American opinion,” Churchill dismissed the notion. Americans’ sentiment, he declared, was not a “classical sentiment” and such raids on ancient and beautiful cities would not horrify Americans any more than other raids on other helpless cities, including London, then the most bombed city in the world. Churchill understood that America would not come in until America itself was the victim of attack.
¹³⁵

M
uch of the intelligence Churchill received (other than Ultra, and some of that was fragmentary) was murky and given to multiple interpretations. Much was rumor. Hints of incomprehensible deeds lurked within the tales. In Romania, rumor had it, Premier General Ion Antonescu—dictator since September and Hitler’s ally since November—was “committing sadistic atrocities unsurpassed in horror.” In fact, Antonescu was putting down a revolt by his erstwhile allies in the Fascist Iron Guard, still a powerful Romanian force. Colville told his diary that the Iron Guard had rounded up Jews, herded them into slaughterhouses and killed them “according to the Jews’ own ritual practices in slaughtering animals.” Antonescu’s loyalty to Hitler was such that the Führer included a qualified kudos (along with a threat) in his New Year’s greeting to Mussolini: “General Antonescu has recognized that the future of his regime, and even of his person, depends on our victory. From this he has drawn clear and direct conclusions which make him go up in my esteem.” Churchill drew his own conclusions regarding the Romanian. He instructed Eden to inform Antonescu that “we will hold him and his immediate circle personally responsible in life and limb” were the rumors of mass murder to prove true.
¹³⁶

More such stories from occupied nations made the rounds, and more often. Hangings for espionage or treasonous offenses against the Reich were to be expected, as was the hanging of Germans who spied against the British Empire. This was war, after all. The British had hanged two German spies just after the close of the old year. But the Germans were taking retaliation to new and unimaginable heights. Polish priests who had fled
Warsaw told their superiors at the Vatican that they feared the Germans planned to “exterminate” the entire Polish people. Another seemingly preposterous story, this one out of Germany, reached the United States. Doctors in the Reich, so the story went, were transporting tens of thousands of “lunatics and cripples” by buses into the forests and there murdering them.
Time,
under the headline E
UTHANASIA
? made brief mention of the tale, but prefaced its report with the caveat that the British had admitted to concocting and spreading similar tales during World War One. William L. Shirer stumbled across the same story months earlier and committed it to his diary before departing Berlin. Given German censorship, broadcast of the news was patently impossible. Shirer feared he’d be shot if the Gestapo were to discover his diary.
¹³⁷

The world now knows that the rumors which long ago seeped from the Continent augured an unimaginable terror. Between 1935 and 1941, Hitler invited the world to witness as the
Reichstag
pushed through laws that deprived Jews first of privileges, then of rights, then of citizenship, and then of their status as human beings. But the window went dark in late 1940 and was shuttered tight when many Western journalists departed Berlin in early 1941. Increasingly harsh Nazi excess was expected, but how far into the deepest and blackest regions of human depravity it would go, nobody then knew, or could imagine. Hitler had promised in a January 1939 speech that a new war would mean “the end of the Jews.” He repeated the threat in January 1941. Should “the rest of the world be plunged into a general war through Jewry, the whole of Jewry will have played out its role in Europe.” He made his intentions clear. But it bears remembering, that even one with so fertile an imagination as Churchill could not imagine at the time the utter evil that the Reich was distilling, and would soon tap.

Churchill tried nonetheless to look beyond the present dangers to the world he envisioned after the war. However wide the range of topics discussed at his dinner table—invasion, the Americans, Charlie Chaplin’s latest, the need to bomb every Hun corner of Europe—he often steered the conversation to the postwar world. At Chequers one evening he sketched his concept of a Council of Europe made up of five nations—England, France, Italy, Spain, and Prussia (old Prussia, which had risen a century earlier to unite all the German principalities)—together with four confederations—Northern, Danubian, Mitteleuropean, and Balkan. These nine powers, vested with a supreme judiciary and a supreme economic council to work out currency and trade questions, would manage the affairs of the Continent. There would be no reparations, no war debts, and no demands made on Prussia, although, other than a defensive air arm, Prussia would be limited for one hundred years to fielding only a militia. The English-speaking world would exist apart from
the council and yet be connected. And, the English-speaking world would control the seas as a reward for final victory. Russia would somehow (Churchill offered no details) fit into an Eastern reorganization. This was his “Grand Design.” Yet he could not make such ideas public, he told Colville, while “every cottager in Europe was calling for German blood and when the English themselves were demanding that all Germans should be massacred or castrated.”
¹³⁸