The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (30 page)

As one American temperance campaigner told him, ‘
Strong drink rageth and stingeth like a serpent’.

To which Churchill replied, ‘I have been looking for a drink like that all my life.’

But the decisive trip was in 1931, after he had left office and begun perhaps the most right-wing period of his political life. He saw the American spirit of enterprise, the way their best people tended to go into business rather than politics. He saw that America was achieving
il sorpasso
—overtaking Britain and all other European powers to become by far the most powerful economy on earth. He recognised that the world’s economic recovery depended on American expansion and growth.

Gone was Churchill the anti-American; gone was any idea of somehow fending off the challenge. Now he began to formulate a
new doctrine—of two nations with a common past and a common tradition, joint trustees and patent-holders of Anglo-Saxon ideas of democracy, and freedom, and equal rights under the law.

So began his relentless advocacy of the ‘English-speaking peoples’, and with his Anglo-American self (naturally) as the incarnation of this union. He proposed a common citizenship. He even suggested that the pound and the dollar should be merged into a single currency, and designed a curious £$ symbol.

This was the Churchill that set out to woo America in 1940. He began in that position known to every love-struck member of the human race, and which we might call romantic asymmetry. That is to say, the relationship meant a lot more to him than it did to Washington.

As he later put it, no lover ever studied the whims of his mistress as carefully as he studied Franklin Roosevelt. Since the President had once served in the navy he wrote to him in ingratiating terms ‘
as one former naval person to another’. He took any opportunity to get the White House on the telephone. He started cultivating American journalists, and inviting them to Chequers.

He aimed his speeches squarely at the American audience who were listening to him in ever greater numbers on the radio. He ended the great 4 June 1940 speech with a direct appeal:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the
fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Notice the invocation of the Almighty—then as now a considerably bigger player in American politics than He is in Britain. He uses the same formula in the climax of
the Oran speech in July: he leaves the judgement on his actions to the United States.

Slowly he began to make progress—but it was hard going, and expensive. First there was the destroyers-for-bases deal. Britain handed over bases in Trinidad, Bermuda and Newfoundland in return for fifty mothballed destroyers. The old bathtubs barely floated—only nine of them were operational by the end of 1940.

Then the Americans agreed to sell some weapons; but the terms of the Neutrality Act meant that Britain had to pay in cash, on the nail. In March 1941 an American cruiser was sent to Cape Town to pick up the country’s last remaining 50 tons of gold bullion, like bailiffs collecting the flat-screen TV. British businesses in America were sold at knock-down prices. When the British started protesting that they were broke, the American government took to querying Britain’s real ability to pay, like a social services department accusing some elderly benefit recipient of concealing her assets.

As for Lend-Lease, by which supplies were continued on the strength of future payments, Churchill may have publicly called it ‘
the most unsordid act in history’. In private he said that
Britain was being skinned and flayed to the bone. Under the terms of the
agreement, the Americans insisted on interfering with Britain’s overseas trade, and stopped the UK from importing much-needed corned beef from Argentina.

The Lend-Lease Act continued to muck up Britain’s right to run its own commercial aviation policy, even after the war was over. It is startling to think that this supposedly unselfish and unsordid act of the US government entailed payments that ended only on—wait for it—31 December 2006, when Mr Ed Balls, then Economic Secretary to the Treasury, wrote a last cheque for $83.3 million or £42.5 million and a letter of thanks to the US government. Has any other country ever been so slavishly punctilious in honouring its war debts?

It has been argued that America took so much cash off Britain in the early stages of the Second World War that this liquidity finally lifted the USA out of depression. The first cranks of the US war machine were powered by UK gold—and yet in spite of the excellent terms they had secured, there were plenty of American politicians, in early 1941, who apparently thought the deal was too generous to the Brits. The Bill was passed in Congress by 260 votes to 165. What were they thinking of, those 165 senators who refused to throw Britain this highly expensive life-jacket? Did they want to watch the old place sink? Well, the truth is that possibly some of them did, just a little.

That was the audience Churchill had to win over. And yet by the end of that same year those same congressmen were eating out of his hand. On Boxing Day 1941 they packed into the chamber—senators and members of the House of Representatives, cheering and cheering Winston Churchill before he had even stood up to speak. What had changed their minds?

Well, there was the small matter of Pearl Harbor, and Japan’s unprovoked aggression; and then there was Hitler’s deranged decision, a few days later, to declare war on America. That may have helped, at last, to encourage the congressmen to identify more closely with
Britain. The interesting question is why the Führer decided to make what looks like a colossal strategic mistake. Why did he declare war on America—when it was still perfectly conceivable that America could have stayed out of the European war?

The answer is that he had already concluded that America was effectively on Britain’s side. By the autumn of 1941 the USA was helping escort convoys; they had troops in Iceland; they were helping with training and supplies of all kinds. Yes, Churchill had succeeded in that strategic mission he had explained so clearly to Randolph eighteen months previously. By the end of 1941 he had become one of the most popular performers on American radio, second only to the President himself. By guile and charm and downright flattery, America had been dragged in.

Three days after Pearl Harbor he received appalling news. The
Prince of Wales
had been sunk by Japanese torpedoes off the coast of Malaya, with the loss of 327 lives. Of the British sailors who had been at Placentia Bay, almost all were dead. The
Repulse
, too, was sunk.

It had been Churchill’s decision—and his alone—to defy the scepticism of his naval chiefs and send those ships to the Far East. No one knew what the purpose of the mission was, what Churchill hoped to achieve with his ‘castles of steel’; and perhaps the truth is that there was no real strategic logic.

Churchill wrote to Roosevelt as he dispatched the British flotilla, boasting of their firepower. ‘
There is nothing like having something that can catch and kill anything,’ he said. They couldn’t catch the Japanese torpedo planes, and they died for the sake of a Churchillian flourish. The purpose was surely political: to show the Americans, once again, the strength of British resolve and the reach of her power. Now that gesture was doubly pointless: the Americans were in.

Still—Churchill needed to make absolutely sure. As soon as he heard of Pearl Harbor, he rang Roosevelt; and then began making
preparations to get over to Washington. After Placentia Bay Roosevelt had come to realise that Churchill had one of those bouncy-castle personalities that starts filling the room and pressing everyone else against the wall. He suggested Bermuda rather than the White House. Churchill was having none of it.

For three weeks he was the irrepressible house guest of the President and Mrs Roosevelt, in which time he contrived to exhibit himself naked to FDR (‘
The British Prime Minister has nothing to hide from the President of the United States’), to have a small heart attack and to put on a virtuoso performance of Anglo-American schmaltz, culminating in that speech to both houses of Congress.

It is tremendous stuff. He invokes the memory of his mother; he quotes the Psalms; he appeals to God; he parodies Mussolini; he hams himself up with glorious archaic phrasing. ‘
Sure I am . . .’ he says, rather than ‘I am sure’, as if he were channelling Yoda. His arms go out, they go up. He hammers the air, he clasps his lapels, he glowers and scowls and clenches his jaw in exactly the manner they have been hoping for.

The Germans, the Japanese, the Italians, he asks his audience: ‘What kind of a people do they think we are?’ Notice that—a single people, the Americans and the British. ‘Here we are together,’ he says. ‘Twice in our lifetime has the long arm of fate reached out across the Atlantic to pluck the United States into the forefront of the battle . . .’ Except that in this case the long arm didn’t belong to fate so much as to Churchill. He did the transatlantic plucking.

As Harold Macmillan later wrote, ‘
No one but he (and that only with extraordinary patience and skill) could have enticed the Americans into the European war at all.’

That does not strike me as being much of an exaggeration. The world may owe its prime debt to F. D. Roosevelt, who ultimately had to take the decision to commit American blood and treasure. But
without Churchill, I really don’t see how it could have happened. No other British leader would have set that strategic objective—to drag America in—and pursued it with such unremitting zeal.

Anyone who is still inclined to feel critical of the United States, for delaying so long before entering the war, should go to the American cemeteries at Omaha Beach. Walk among the thousands of white stone crosses (and the occasional Star of David) that are arranged with such perfect symmetry on the rolling green lawns; see the names and the states: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Kansas, Texas—every state in the union. I doubt very much you will keep back the tears.

It is seventy years, as I write these words, since those soldiers made that sacrifice, on a scale and with a bravery that my generation finds incomprehensible. They weren’t wrong, those American congressmen, when they warned of the human consequences of engagement in another European war. Their doubts were reasonable; and it was Churchill who overcame them.

He later described how on the night of Pearl Harbor, ‘
saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful’.

He had succeeded in his key strategic purpose; but he had not yet won.

CHAPTER 18

THE GIANT OF THE SHRUNKEN ISLAND

T
he King was in a state of agitation, bordering on mild panic. It was 11 p.m. on a Friday night, and he still had not heard from his most important and in some ways his most insubordinate subject. He rang his Private Secretary. Any news from Churchill? There was no news.

The date was 3 June 1944, and in theory there were just two days to go until D-Day. The whole war depended on this operation, the largest and most complex military undertaking in history; the fate of the world seemed to hang in the balance—and Churchill was being utterly impossible.

The sixty-nine-year-old veteran of wars on four continents was insisting on one more hare-brained escapade. He was exercising his right, as Minister of Defence, to be conveyed on HMS
Belfast
to the coast of Normandy, where he would personally oversee the first bombardment of the German positions. He didn’t want to go on D-Day plus one, or D-Day plus two: he planned to be there with the first
wave of ships and men; to see the water roiling with machines and blood; to hear the crump of the shells.

The idea was nuts. That was certainly the view of the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan or ‘Tommy’ Lascelles. The first he had heard of it was on 30 May, when the King emerged from a tête-à-tête lunch with Churchill at Buckingham Palace. Churchill had confided that he intended to go and watch events from the British battle-cruiser. The King had immediately said that he would go, too; a suggestion that Churchill did nothing to discourage.

‘
This will never do,’ said Lascelles to himself. But at first he tried to be casual. Would it be quite fair to the Queen? he asked the King. It would be necessary to advise the young Princess Elizabeth on a choice of Prime Minister—in the perfectly conceivable event of both the heads of the British state and government ending up at the bottom of the Channel. And it was just unfair, added Lascelles, on the poor captain of the
Belfast
, who would have to worry about his sacred charges in what would almost certainly be an inferno of fire.

Hmm, said the King, who had no desire to be accused of such selfishness. He could see the point. Within a few minutes the courtier had talked down the Sovereign. But what about Churchill?

Quickly Lascelles drafted
a letter for the King—which George VI wrote out obediently, in his own hand—and pelted round to Downing Street.

My dear Winston [said the King (or Lascelles)], I have been thinking a great deal of our conversation yesterday and I have come to the conclusion that it would not be right for either you or I to be where we planned to be on D-Day. I don’t think I need emphasise what it would mean to me personally, and to the whole allied cause, if at this juncture a chance bomb, torpedo or even a mine should remove you from the scene; equally a change of sovereign at this moment would be a serious matter for the country and Empire. We should both I know love to be there, but in all seriousness I would ask you to reconsider your plan. Our presence I feel would be an embarrassment to those fighting the ship or ships on which we were, despite anything we might say to them.