Finest Years (41 page)

On 20 June at Hyde Park, Churchill handed Roosevelt a masterly note on strategy. Arrangements for a landing in France in September were going forward, said the prime minister. However, the British continued to oppose such an operation unless there was a realistic prospect of being able to stay. ‘
No responsible British
military authority has so far been able to make a plan for September 1942 which has any chance of success unless the Germans become utterly demoralised, of which there is no likelihood. Have the American staffs a plan? If so, what is it? If a plan can be found which offers a reasonable prospect of success His Majesty's Government will cordially welcome it and will share to the full with their American comrades the risks and sacrifices…But in case no plan can be made in which any responsible authority has good confidence…what else
are we going to do? Can we afford to stand idle in the Atlantic theatre during the whole of 1942?' It was in this context, urged Churchill, that a North African landing should be studied.

That evening, president and prime minister flew to the capital. They were together at the White House when a pink message slip was brought to Roosevelt, who passed it wordlessly to Churchill. It read: ‘Tobruk has surrendered, with 25,000 men taken prisoner.' Churchill was initially disbelieving. Before leaving Britain he had signalled to Auchinleck, stressing the importance of holding the port: ‘Your decision to fight it out to the end most cordially endorsed. Retreat would be fatal. This is a business not only of armour but of will power. God bless you all.' Now the prime minister telephoned Ismay in London, who confirmed the loss of Tobruk, together with 33,000 men, 2,000 vehicles, 5,000 tons of supplies and 1,400 tons of fuel. A chaotic defence, left in the hands of a newly promoted and inexperienced South African major-general, had collapsed in the face of an unexpected German thrust from the south-east. The débâcle was characterised by command incompetence, a pitiful indolence and lack of initiative among many units. Maj.Gen. Klopper's last signal from Tobruk was an enigmatic study in despair: ‘Situation shambles…Am doing the worst. Petrol destroyed.'

The prime minister was stunned, humiliated. It seemed unbearable that such news should have come while he was a visitor, indeed a suppliant, in Washington. Roosevelt, perceiving his guest's despondency, responded with unprecedented spontaneity, generosity and warmth. ‘What can we do to help?' he asked. After consultation with his chiefs of staff, the president briefly entertained a notion of dispatching a US armoured division to fight in Egypt. On reflection, it was agreed instead to send the formation's 300 Sherman tanks and 100 self-propelled guns, for British use. This reinforcement, of quality equipment, was critical to later British victory at Alamein. Roosevelt's gesture, which required the removal of new weapons from a US combat formation, prompted the deepest and best-merited British gratitude towards the president of the war.

The American historian Douglas Porch, one of the ablest
chroniclers of the Mediterranean campaigns, believes that Churchill fundamentally misjudged American attitudes towards Britain's war effort. The prime minister wanted a victory in the Middle East, to dispel US scepticism about British fighting capability. Porch argues, however: ‘
It was Britain's beleaguered
helplessness that evoked most sympathy in Washington and helped to prepare the American people psychologically to intervene in the war.' It was certainly true that Americans pitied British material weakness. Yet an enduring source of US resentment, reflected in polls throughout much of the war, was a belief that the British were not merely ill-armed, but also did not try hard enough. It was one thing for the US to provide food and arms to a defiantly struggling democracy, it was quite another to see the British apparently content to sit tight in their island, and conduct lethargic minor operations in North Africa, while the Russians did the real business, and paid the horrific blood price, of destroying Hitler's armies.

It was remarkable how much the mood in Washington had shifted since January. This time, there was no adulation for Churchill the visitor. ‘
Anti-British feeling is still
strong,'the British embassy reported to London, ‘stronger than it was before Pearl Harbor…This state of affairs is partly due to the fact that whereas it was difficult to criticise Britain while the UK was being bombed, such criticism no longer carries the stigma of isolationist or pro-Nazi sympathies.' Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana declared sourly that ‘
there was little point in supplying
the British with war material since they invariably lost it all'. Roosevelt's secretary, William Hassett, wrote in his diary: ‘
These English are too aggressive
except on the battlefront, as assertive as the Jews, always asking for a little more and then still more after that.' Hassett admitted that the president found Churchill ‘
a delightful companion
', but added: ‘With a softie for president, Winnie would put rollers under the Treasury and open Second, Third, or Fourth Fronts with our fighting men.'

As for the general public, an Ohioan wrote to the White House: ‘Tell that Churchill to go home where he belongs…All he wants is our money.' An anonymous ‘mother of three' sought to address
Britain's prime minister from California: ‘Every time you appear on our shores, it means something very terrible for us. Why not stay at home and fight your own battles instead of always pulling us into them to save your rotten necks?' A New Yorker's letter to a friend in Somerset, intercepted by the censors, said: ‘
I knew when I saw
your fat-headed PM was over here that there was another disaster in the offing.' Such views were untypical—most Americans retained warm respect for Churchill. But they reflected widespread scepticism about his nation's willingness to fight, and doubt whether the prime minister's wishes coincided with American national interest. ‘
All the old animosities
against the British have been revived,' wrote an analyst for the Office of War Information. ‘She didn't pay her war debts after the last war. She refuses to grant India the very freedom she claims to be fighting for. She is holding a vast army in England to protect the homeland while her outposts are lost to the enemy.'

A further report later in the summer detected a marginal improvement of sentiment, but found confidence in the British still much below that of the previous autumn. It noted: ‘
Phrases such as
“the British always want someone to pull their chestnuts out of the fire” and “England will fight to the last Frenchman” have attained considerable currency.'
The OWI's July survey
invited Americans to say which nation they thought was trying hardest to win the war. A loyal 37 per cent answered the United States, 30 per cent named Russia, 14 per cent China, 13 per cent offered no opinion. Just 6 per cent identified the British as most convincing triers. A similar poll the following month asked which belligerent was perceived as having the best fighting spirit.
Some 65 per cent said
America, 6 per cent named Britain. The same survey highlighted Americans' stunning ignorance about the difficulties of mounting an invasion of Europe. A 57 per cent majority said they thought the Allies should launch a Second Front ‘within two to three months'. A similar 53 per cent thought that such an operation would have a ‘pretty good' chance of success, while 29 per cent reckoned the odds 50-50, and only 10 per cent feared that an invasion would fail. A remarkable 60 per cent of respondents thought not merely
that an invasion of France should happen inside three months—they anticipated that it would.

US Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote on 9 July 1942 to Stafford Cripps, who had expressed concern about Anglo-American relations: ‘
The dominant underlying feeling
is not bad…But there is a central difficulty. It is, as I see it, a lack of continuing consciousness of comradeship between the two peoples, not only in staving off an enemy that threatens everything we hold dear, but comradeship in achieving a common society having essentially the same gracious and civilized ends.' Columnist Walter Lippmann expressed similar views to Maynard Keynes. There was a need, suggested Lippmann, for a new political understanding between Britain and the US about the future of its empire: ‘
The Asiatic war has revived
the profound anti-imperialism of the American tradition.'

The Foreign Office was dismayed by remarks made by the anglophile Wendell Willkie during a visit to Moscow. He told British ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr that US public opinion towards Britain was shaping ‘dangerously', and that he was ‘scared' by it. Not one of the Americans he had met on his journey between Washington and Moscow, from truck drivers to ambassadors, had a good word for British behaviour abroad. He urged that the prime minister should make a speech on post-war policy showing that he realised that ‘
old-fashioned imperialism
' was dead. Churchill, of course, had no intention of doing any such thing.

A 6 July report to the Foreign Office about the British embassy in Washington was almost flagellatory about the American view of Halifax's mission: ‘
The Embassy…has a quite fantastically
low reputation. It is regarded as snobbish, arrogant, patronising, dim, asleep and a home of reactionary and generally disreputable ideas.' The report then listed popular American objections to Britain, headed by its class system, which was alienating workers—‘the British are going red'; imperialism; ‘British bunglers in high places: overcautious, contemptuous of all new ideas and defensively minded, tired old men bored with their own task…British sitting safely in own island with 3.5 million men under arms, Brits always being
defeated…Lend-Lease is stripping America to supply the British who have not even paid their [First] war debts…Anti-British sentiment is a part of the central patriotic American tradition…Anglophobia is a proof of vigorous Americanism, socially acceptable in a way anti-Catholicism and anti-semitism are not…All the Roosevelt-haters hate the English because they are held to be popular with the President.'

British postal censorship reported to the Foreign Office on a crosssection of US opinion monitored in mail intercepts. From Newark, New Jersey, a man wrote to a friend in Britain: ‘Believe me we here are disgusted reading of British retreats and nobody blames the Tommy. We blame the Brass Hats for their inefficiency and being outmanoeuvred by Jerry every time.' On 11 September, a New Yorker wrote in the same vein: ‘There is no doubt that something is rotten about the British command everywhere…It isn't always lack of material—it is more often blind stupidity.' Another New Yorker, posted to Australia, wrote to a British friend in Stoke-on-Trent: ‘English imperialism is responsible for more of our griefs and wars than you can shake a stick at. Incidentally I'm surprised to find that a great many Aussies hate the set-up in England more than I do! You IMPOSSIBLE English!'

Eden's Minister of State Richard Law, son of former prime minister Bonar Law, dispatched an extraordinarily emotional report to the Foreign Office during a visit to America. He claimed that in US Army training camps ‘anti-British feeling was beyond belief…deliberately inculcated by certain higher officers, notably General [Brehon] Somervell, who mocked that Churchill lacked the “sustained excitement” to execute a cross-channel attack'. Throughout the higher command of the US Army, claimed Law, anti-British feeling was intense. There was violent jealousy of the prime minister, who was regarded as dominating and bamboozling the president. The American chiefs of staff ‘
were about as friendly
to the British as they would be to the German general staff if they sat round a table with them'. This was an extravagant assessment of Anglo-American tensions. But it illustrates the scale of concern in British official
circles in 1942, when the nation's military reputation was at its lowest ebb.

Churchill knew that his nation and his soldiers had to be seen to fight. If they could not engage in Europe, they must do so in the Middle East. The long periods of passivity which gripped Eighth Army in North Africa, however necessary logistically, inflicted immense harm upon both British self-esteem and the nation's image abroad. At a war cabinet meeting presided over by Attlee, Bevin declaimed theatrically: ‘
We must have a victory!
What the British public wants is a victory!' When John Kennedy was summoned to Downing Street, the prime minister talked of current operations in North Africa, ‘then added a dig at the British Army (which unfortunately he can never resist) saying, “if Rommel's army were all Germans, they would beat us.”' Later, the DMO reported the conversation to Brooke: ‘
I told him what Winston
had said about the Germans being better than our troops & he said he must speak to Winston about this. His constant attacks on the Army were doing harm—especially when they were made in the presence of other politicians, as they so often were.' Yet so ashamed was Kennedy, as a soldier, about the fall of Tobruk that for some time he avoided his beloved ‘Rag'—the Army & Navy club—to escape unwelcome questions about the army's lamentable showing.

While Churchill was in Washington in June, some American newspapers suggested that his government would fall. He was sufficiently alarmed by what he read to telephone Eden from the White House for reassurance that there was no critical threat to his leadership. Nothing important had changed, he was told, but Tory MP Sir John Wardlaw-Milne had tabled a censure motion in the Commons. Public opinion was fragile. ‘
The people do not like
him being away so much in such critical times,' wrote a naval officer. A Mass-Observation diarist, Rosemary Black, deplored Churchill's absence in America at a time when the British people were enduring so much bad news: ‘
I myself felt
pretty disgusted with him when I saw a photograph of him enjoying himself at the White House again. If only he'd keep those great gross cigars out of his face once in a way.'