The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (358 page)

On March 1, Hitler secured his right of way to Yugoslavia and Greece when Bulgaria ignored Churchill’s warning of February 9 and signed on with Hitler. The Bulgarians had no choice. Since the previous autumn, Hitler had pressed Yugoslavia and Bulgaria to join the Tripartite Pact, as had Hungary and Romania, each in its own turn humiliated and cajoled into becoming Nazi cat’s-paws. Bulgaria was the latest to succumb. Its king, Boris, ruled a country that was Russia’s only real friend in Europe, a good friend of long standing, by mutual agreement. Czar Nicholas II was Boris’s godfather; Russia had backed Bulgaria in its exit from the Ottoman Empire sixty years previously. These were cultural bonds of a sort Hitler could not tolerate, for if Boris and Stalin were to strengthen them, Hitler would be denied his most direct transit to Greece. The Führer made Boris the same offer he had made Antonescu the previous autumn, a guarantee of protection. Of course, the refusal of such protection would result in
problematic relations with the Reich. Boris faced a choice between two evils: to make way for the
Wehrmacht
or to be taken out of the way.

Boris, a peaceful man who liked to collect butterflies and tinker with automobile engines, was made of stern enough stuff to say no to Hitler, but his army could not back him up. No army in Europe could back up any leader who said no to Hitler. Had Bulgaria been protected by an oceanic tank ditch, as was Britain, Boris might have bought more time. Furthermore, Boris’s ministers were pro-German, his wife pro-Italian, and his people pro-Russian. His safest move was to put himself under Hitler’s protection, which he did on March 1. Hitler now held both banks of the Danube down to the Black Sea, and he had plans for the seven hundred German pontoon bridges sitting on the Romanian bank.
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On March 6 Lend-Lease began the third month of its journey through Congress; the U.S. Senate had been debating the bill for almost a month. That day, Churchill displayed his displeasure over the lethargic pace of the legislation when he appeared late, tired, and “grumpy” at No. 10 for a luncheon held for James Conant. The guests dined in awkward silence until Conant voiced his “belligerent” interventionist views. At that, Churchill became animated and turned the talk to Lend-Lease: “This bill has to pass,” he snarled. Conant recalled the Old Man’s “irritation rising as he spoke.” Churchill went on: “What a failure he [Roosevelt] would appear if this bill is not passed. What would happen in the United States if the bill was rejected? Would the president resign” and if so, “who would become president, the vice-president?”
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Conant was stunned. He asked himself if Churchill might “really have such a profound ignorance of the American constitutional system.” The Harvard man—wary of angering Churchill—gently informed him that an American president, unlike a British prime minister, did not resign after major political setbacks, and that America “did not operate under a parliamentary system,” as did the British. Emboldened by “gaining the ascendancy for a moment,” Conant tossed out the prospects of American armies coming to the rescue. “We don’t want your men,” Churchill snarled, “just give us the tools and we shall finish the job.” Conant realized at that moment what many of Churchill’s dinner companions had long known: “Mr. Churchill had this way of quoting from his own speeches even in casual conversation.” Churchill plowed on, insisting to Conant that nobody in England had ever in public asked America to enter the war. Conant took Churchill’s words at face value but was skeptical and felt that “Mr. Churchill and his associates were not entirely frank” and tended to say one thing “while thinking quite another,” although “no responsible
statesman is required to be completely candid.” Conant concluded that Churchill had “rather let himself go” during the luncheon, “perhaps unconsciously, perhaps consciously for my benefit.”

Conant did not yet understand that Churchill put on a show whenever he had an audience. Ambiguity was alien to the man. Churchill, wrote Sir John Keegan, “had no capacity for sustained dissimulation.” His outburst produced the intended results. Conant rushed back to his hotel and—“upset at Churchill’s troubled eloquence”—fired off letters to his wife and colleagues in which he asked, “Why don’t they pass Lend-Lease? Why doesn’t FDR appeal to the country in another radio speech?”
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Roosevelt had no need to. Conant, overseas for three weeks, was unaware that during those weeks, Roosevelt’s victory in the Senate had gone from a possibility to a certainty. Apparently Churchill’s Washington embassy was furnishing him with no better intelligence than Conant was deriving from his friends. In any case, Lend-Lease cleared the U.S. Senate by a vote of 60–31 on March 8. Roosevelt signed it on the eleventh. “The bill,” Churchill told Winant, “is a draught of life.” But it was not as sweet a draught as he thought. The
New York Times
reported that the president had said the first matériel to be sent to the British and Greeks was not very large in dollars and cents, but, whatever the amount, it would be charged against the limitation of $1.3 billion “placed by the lease-lend bill upon the value of materials that may be transferred from the existing facilities of the Army and Navy. Figures before the President did not necessarily mean the billing price inasmuch as much of the material was considered out of date, or surplus, and
not worth the money paid a good many years ago
”(italics added).
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Britain’s first shipments of arms, therefore, would consist of junk, long since written off America’s books. British pilots were training in America, and American pilots, including women, were ferrying bombers to Britain. Fuel and ammunition arrived at British ports weekly. But as with the obsolete destroyers, Roosevelt told Americans they were getting the best of the deal. No doubt Churchill, too, would get a good deal,
if
Congress passed—and passed rapidly—the pending appropriation of $7 billion. That was a lot of money in 1941. Yet even fully funded, Lend-Lease would only partially address Britain’s needs. On the day the bill passed, a dozen oil tankers and refrigerator ships were scheduled to sail for England. In peacetime such a fleet could, by way of round-trip relays, fuel and feed a moderate-size city, indefinitely. Yet, at the rate U-boats were sending British hulls to the bottom in early 1941, Britain would have to spend much of its Lend-Lease windfall on new ships, with little left over to fill their holds.
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Churchill put a good face on the matter, as he had with the fifty old
destroyers. To the House of Commons, he declared that by taking this action, “the Government and people of the United States have in fact written a new Magna Carta, which not only has regards to the rights and laws upon which a healthy and advancing civilization can alone be erected but also proclaims… the duty of free men and free nations, wherever they may be, to share the burden and responsibility of enforcing them.” Later in the year, as tens of thousands of tons of American matériel sailed to Britain, he told the audience at the annual Lord Mayor’s Day luncheon, “Never again let us hear the taunt that money is the ruling thought or power in the hearts of the American democracy. The Lend and Lease Bill must be regarded without question as the most unsordid act in the whole of recorded history.” Lend-Lease was a start, but enough of a start for Churchill to conclude that Britain no longer would fight with its back to the Atlantic but henceforth with America at its back. That alone would not ensure a British victory, but it would make British defeat almost impossible—almost but not absolutely, because American industrial capacity had yet to reach a level that could guarantee British survival. Harry Hopkins told Churchill he believed America would reach its stride in eighteen months. Churchill estimated America needed at least two years to attain full war production. Hitler’s best estimate, which he imparted to the Japanese foreign minister, was four years.
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Two years would prove a year too many if Britain’s shipping losses continued at February’s pace, when almost 320,000 tons went down. March was shaping up as the worst month yet. Losses in the first week approached 150,000 tons, more than twice the average for any
three
weeks of the war, and were easily on a pace to exceed 400,000 tons for the month. Britain’s importing capacity—the gross tonnage of material it could handle with its fleet, its docks, and warehouses—had fallen from almost 43 million tons in 1939 to under 29 million, a level not seen since 1917. The Atlantic Ocean, Churchill had predicted early in the year, would be the major battleground of 1941. He anointed the ordeal the Battle of the Atlantic with the same intent as when the previous summer he anointed the pending battle the Battle of Britain, to focus the attention of the government and the people upon the most immediate threat to their existence. But whereas in 1940, the RAF could put into the skies enough Spitfires and Hurricanes to fight the Luftwaffe to a stalemate, the Royal Navy in March of 1941 had not the ships, nor the weapons, nor the advanced radar needed to stop Dönitz’s U-boats. As well, the Focke-Wulf 200 bombers that Raeder had snatched from Göring had taken their toll, until Göring returned from his vacation and demanded their return. British shipping losses due to German aircraft began to fall, and continued to do so throughout the spring and summer. By recalling his bombers, Göring had committed a strategic blunder. Still,
by March the German navy and the Luftwaffe had just about severed the sea-lanes into Britain.
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The continuing success of the Germans against British shipping and the prospect of greater losses to come was, Churchill wrote in his memoirs, “the only thing that really frightened me during the war.” U-boats and German bombers had so far sent 15 percent of Britain’s prewar merchant fleet of eighteen million tons to the bottom. One million tons had gone down since the American election. Norway had added a thousand ships and almost three million tons to the Allied merchant marine, but Norwegian ships were being hit as hard as British. Were half of the remaining British shipping to go to the bottom, Britain would starve. National survival depended upon convoys bearing wheat getting through. A halving in wheat imports could, in a few months time, result in a Malthusian halving of the British population. It was just that simple. Churchill pleaded with Roosevelt throughout the first seven months of the year to move the American patrol zone into the far eastern Atlantic, to arm American merchantmen (a violation of the Neutrality Act of 1939), and to show the flag in the vicinity of the Azores (where U-boats resupplied and re-armed with impunity). In Churchill’s estimation, if Lend-Lease had put America on the path to war, let the journey continue apace.
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Roosevelt, though ready to help, was not ready to fight. Restrained by conflicting and strongly held public opinion, he made his way along his chosen path with the same tortured gait he displayed while thrusting himself through the rejuvenating waters of Warm Springs, in the central Georgia foothills of the Appalachians. There, he took his measured and painful steps, with the utmost care, lest his footing be unsure. Heroic as his progress was—in the medicinal springs of Georgia and in the politics of war—Roosevelt’s progress when it came to Hitler was not swift enough for Churchill.

W
ith Lend-Lease on the books, Roosevelt dispatched Averell Harriman as his special envoy to London with the extraordinary mandate, to “recommend everything we can do, short of war, to keep the British Isles afloat.” Harriman reported directly to Hopkins and the president, a ploy that kept Secretary of State Cordell Hull (to Hull’s increasing annoyance) on the sidelines. Harriman also consulted directly with Churchill, thus bypassing the Foreign Office. Lend-Lease was not strictly speaking a matter of foreign affairs but rather one of American national security and, for Britain, national survival. Roosevelt’s choice of Harriman was brilliant. He represented America’s capitalist class rather than the Democratic Party’s ideological class. He was a product of Groton (the motto of which is
cui severe est regnare,
“to serve is to rule”) and Yale. His politics was business. The captains of industry Roosevelt needed on his side listened to Harriman. Almost fifty, he had never lacked that which Churchill always had lacked: money, and not simply money, but
capital.
He dressed the part. If Anthony Eden was the most impeccably attired Englishman in the land, Harriman took the honors for visitors, always smartly attired in trim, custom-made dark suits that accentuated his sharp WASP features. Pamela Churchill was certainly taken with him, and within a few weeks, taken by him.
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