The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (387 page)

Having regaled and thanked his obligors (though promising many more “dark and weary months of defeat” before victory was theirs), Churchill left Ottawa by train on New Year’s Eve. The outside temperature had dropped to minus fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. The mood in the cars was somber. At the stroke of midnight, as the train highballed through the Hudson River Valley, Churchill stepped into the press carriage, a glass of champagne in hand. He raised it: “Here’s to 1942. Here’s to a year of toil—a year of struggle and peril, and a long step forward towards victory. May we all come through safe and with honor.”
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One hundred miles to the south, the biggest and gayest crowd in memory gathered in Times Square. Only the military police standing in pairs on street corners and a huge white sign that asked “Remember Pearl Harbor” served notice that this celebration was unique. Just before midnight, as the glowing ball atop the New York Times Building began its descent, Lucy Monroe, the official soloist of the American Legion, began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The crowd listened at first in silence, but soon joined in. Radio networks beamed the anthem across the nation. In Washington, the mood was not gay. Troopers of the 3rd Cavalry Regiment, searching for saboteurs, spent New Year’s Eve crawling along the aqueduct that carried drinking water to the capital from western Maryland. Infantrymen with fixed bayonets and live ammunition patrolled the Potomac bridges, while others put a cordon around the White House. Not since Confederate general Jubal Early knocked on the city’s defenses in the summer of 1864 had so many soldiers swarmed the streets of Washington.
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In blacked-out London, a crowd that was gathered around St. Paul’s Cathedral sang “Auld Lang Syne” when the clock struck midnight. The bells of London’s churches remained silent, as they had for more than a year and a half. Then, inexplicably, the crowd broke into a chorus of “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain,” before dispersing and breaking up into ever smaller groups, each to wander home through the dark streets, with the occasional nervous glance jerked skyward. Harold Nicolson had not ventured out, but he listened to his wireless as Big Ben struck midnight. In his diary, Nicolson wrote, “And 1941 is finished…. It has been a sad and horrible year.” No fires burned, but London could have served as a model for
Destruction,
the fourth painting in Thomas Cole’s five-picture series,
The Course of Empire.
With America in, the odds had improved that London might never resemble Cole’s final canvas:
Desolation.
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General Sir Alan Brooke, looking back on the old year, asked for God’s help in dealing with the “difficult times with the P.M. I see clearly ahead of me.” As for the status of the Dominions, Brooke concluded, “We’re not doing too bad. We’ve only lost about a quarter of the empire.” Measured in square miles, his dour estimate was exaggerated. Measured in public confidence, especially among those of the Empire’s citizens who dwelled in the Far East, it was not. Given the speed with which the Japanese were building their new empire on the ruins of Britain’s old empire, Brooke’s calculation seemed destined for fulfillment, and soon. His prediction of the looming difficulties inherent in working with Churchill was of course self-evidently correct.
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Churchill now operated in two worlds, one London, where “Action This Day” brought immediate results, the other a new world of action (and inaction) by committees seeking consensus. Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin were in overall agreement on the broadest objective, victory, but when they set about drawing up a declaration of solidarity, the devil began insinuating himself into the details. When the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Maxim Maximovich Litvinov, objected, at Stalin’s insistence, to the inclusion of the phrase “religious freedom” in the draft declaration of the Associated Powers, Roosevelt (a religious man) lectured the ambassador “about his soul and the dangers of hell-fire.” Roosevelt then reminded Litvinov that “freedom of religion” can be also construed to mean freedom
from
religion. Stalin approved the insertion of the clause. The alliance between a Christian republic, a parliamentary democracy, and a murderous Godless dictator could hardly have begun otherwise.
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Stalin wanted the declaration to reflect another position dear to him. The first article of the pact called for each signatory to employ all military and economic resources “against those members of the Tripartite Pact and its adherents with which such government is at war.” As the Soviet Union was
not at war with Japan, the final seven words of article 1 gave Stalin an out should anyone suggest down the road that he declare war on Japan. Roosevelt, meanwhile, happy with the entire document but not happy with the moniker “Associated Powers,” came up with a more vivid name: the United Nations. Intent on sharing his suggestion with Churchill, the president wheeled himself down the hallway and into Churchill’s room, where the prime minister, preparing for his bath, was wandering about stark naked. Taking no notice of Churchill’s nakedness, Roosevelt suggested his proposed name change. Churchill replied, “Good,” and added that Byron employed the same choice of words in
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
Churchill later told King George that he was the first British prime minister in history to greet a head of state naked. He later wrote he thought Roosevelt’s “United Nations” “a great improvement” over the “Associated Powers.”
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On December 12, the
New York Times
had run a list of the twenty-five
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allied combatants. India—whose troops had so far fought in North Africa, Malaya, Iraq, and Persia—was absent from the
Times
roll call. India’s exclusion made sense to Churchill; India was, after all, part of the British Empire, its foreign policy dictated by London. Churchill had for months made clear that any change in India’s colonial status could only take place after the war, and that he could not, by law, dictate terms to a postwar Parliament in which he and his coalition government might play no role. But Roosevelt sought India’s inclusion in the pact, and he instructed Hull to prod the British on the matter, an assignment Hull embraced with alacrity as a staunch anti-imperialist and still fuming over the St-Pierre incident (which he suspected Churchill of encouraging). The War Cabinet objected to India’s inclusion, rightly so in Churchill’s opinion. Halifax, keen to avoid trouble with the Americans, suggested to Churchill that India’s participation in drafting the Versailles Treaty two decades earlier might serve as a precedent for its inclusion in the allied pact, and thus mollify Roosevelt. A compromise was reached: India would be included in the roll call of allies, but without any notation that implied sovereignty. With India, as with the exclusion of the Free French, Churchill deferred to Roosevelt.
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He did so again when Roosevelt demanded that the United States be the first signatory to the pact, followed by the other three powers: Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China. China’s emotional importance to Roosevelt was bolstered by strategic considerations. Here was a nation of
almost five hundred million people, he told Churchill, which would emerge from the war armed and eager to fill the vacuum created by the defeat of Japan. Better to court the Chinese now than to have to face them later. China, for Churchill, was an ally, but “not a world power equal to Britain, the United States, or Russia.” Yet so firm was Roosevelt regarding China’s status that Churchill cabled Wavell: “If I can epitomize in one word the lesson I learned in the United States, it was ‘China.’ ” China took fourth billing.

On one point of language the president failed to prevail; he disliked the designation favored by the press, “World War Two,” and called for suggestions for a more poetic name. H. L. Mencken compiled a list of the many proposals that flowed into the White House, including the “War for Survival,” the “Necessary War,” the “Crazy War,” the “War Against Tyrants,” the “Devil’s War,” and “Hell.” Any and all of those names applied to the conflict, but the press stuck with World War Two. Churchill, too, offered Roosevelt a name for the war; it summed up in three words the entire legacy of the appeasers and isolationists: “The Unnecessary War.”
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O
n January 5, after almost two weeks of discussions, not wanting to further tax Roosevelt’s hospitality yet not ready to return home (the American and British military chiefs were just getting down to business), Churchill accepted the offer of Lend-Lease administrator Edward Stettinius to spend a few days at Stettinius’s Pompano Beach, Florida, seaside manse. The Old Man needed a break, and Roosevelt and Hopkins needed a break—from Churchill. Eleanor Roosevelt later recalled, “I was solicitous for [Churchill’s] comfort, but I was always glad when he departed, for I knew that my husband would need a rest, since he had carried his usual hours of work in addition to the unusual ones Mr. Churchill preferred.” The meetings had so drained Harry Hopkins he checked into the Washington Naval Hospital for a week of bed rest.
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Churchill and a dozen or so of his party along with a Secret Service detail flew down to the small airfield in West Palm Beach aboard Marshall’s plane. From there they motored an hour south to Pompano, where the locals were told that the activity out at the Stettinius house was due to the arrival of an English invalid by the name of Mr. Lobb. Mr. Lobb, upon arrival, headed straightaway for the beach, where he reveled in the warm ocean waters, and swam about, naked, until somebody spotted a large shark. “They said it was only a ‘ground shark,’ ” Churchill later wrote, “but it is as bad to be eaten by a ground shark as any other.” Inspector Thompson ordered him out of the water, but Churchill stayed put, pawing
happily about. The shark, after describing a long, slow circle, swam off. “My bulk,” Churchill shouted to those on shore, “has frightened him into deeper water.” Still, from then on he kept to the shallows, where he basked “half submerged in the water, like a hippopotamus in a swamp.” Thompson thought Churchill, sunbathing, nude, “looked like a huge, well adjusted, and slightly over-bottled baby boy.”

Roosevelt sent along his personal chef and a favorite recipe for clam chowder, but Churchill preferred Bovril washed down with champagne. He smoked his cigars and drank and frolicked in the surf in sunny and isolated South Florida, about as far from the war as he could get. It was his first holiday in three years. Although in early January Americans had no real idea of just what troubles were heading their way, Churchill, bobbing in the Florida surf, knew “without doubt” what lay before them all—“a time of tribulation” and “disappointments and unpleasant surprises.” He had told Britons as much for almost two years, and had told Americans the same just days earlier. He knew that upon his arrival in London—“it was to no sunlit prospect that I must return”—he would again have to inform the King, the Parliament, and Britons that the worst was yet to come. After five days of whisky, hot baths, and warm Florida, Churchill telephoned Roosevelt to inform the president that he was about to depart for Washington. Mindful of John Martin’s pleas to exercise
some
caution when speaking over nonsecure phone lines, he whispered, “I can’t tell you how we are coming, but we are coming by puff-puff, got it?
Puff-puff.
”
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Mrs. Roosevelt invited a special guest to dinner on Churchill’s penultimate evening in the White House: Louis Adamic. Slovenian by birth, Adamic by 1942 had become one of the most popular and controversial ethnic American writers. His progressive ideas had found favorable conditions in which to sprout at the traditionally anti-imperialist State Department, which had developed on certain desks a list to the left. Having read and enjoyed Adamic’s latest book,
Two-Way Passage,
the First Lady must have known Churchill would find no comfort in the author’s company. Adamic argued the case for America to take the lead in postwar European political reconstruction by sending “qualified” liberal expatriate thinkers such as himself back to the Old World to inculcate in its citizens a less chauvinistic outlook, such that undesirable elements could not influence events. Chief among these undesirable elements was the “Eagle of Yugoslavia” Draja Mihailovich and his 150,000 mostly Serbian Chetnik guerrillas who had for seven months been fighting a vicious war against Hitler’s occupying forces, tying down ten German and Bulgarian divisions in the process. For this Mihailovich was hailed as a hero in the West, and by Churchill.
Adamic, however, supported the partisans led by Josip Broz, a Croat by birth, Socialist by choice, and virtually unknown in America. His followers called him Tito (Churchill, per his habit of getting names wrong, called him Toty). As for other European elements, Adamic saw the Soviets as posing no threat to anyone after the war. Britain was another matter; Britain followed Mihailovich on Adamic’s list of undesirable scallywags to be excluded from postwar influence, especially in the Balkans. The Roosevelts, husband and wife, much impressed with Adamic, passed his book along to Churchill. He hated it.
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