Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (6 page)

Churchill’s immediate and instinctive reaction was elation. Leaping at once to the conclusion that this would bring America fully into the war, he believed it meant nothing less than victory—not at once, of course, but eventually, and without question. For more than a year Britain had struggled virtually alone against Hitler’s war machine, suffering privation due to the U-boat blockade, enduring almost daily bombing attacks, and anticipating imminent invasion. During those months, Churchill had personified British defiance and determination, alternately shaking his fist at the Nazis and mocking their pretensions while simultaneously calling for sacrifice (“blood, toil, tears, and sweat”) from the British population. He had promised ultimate victory, but those promises had been more a measure of his resolve than genuine expectation. For all his bulldog defiance, he had been compelled to act the supplicant to the wealthy and powerful Americans, accepting the concessions, however demeaning, that Roosevelt demanded in exchange for American support in order to allay the suspicions of American isolationists and convince them that the United States was not giving anything away. When in June 1941 Hitler’s armored divisions had smashed their way into Soviet Russia, England was no longer alone, and Churchill had begun to hope. Now, with the United States in the war, hope changed to certainty. He was convinced that with Russian manpower, American
wealth, and British grit, “Hitler’s fate was sealed.” His mood soared. “England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live.” The evening was still young by Churchill’s standards, and after seeing his guests off, he got to work at once, calling members of the cabinet and arranging for a special session of the House of Commons the next day. As usual for him, it was a late night. At last, in the early morning hours of December 8, he headed for bed. As he wrote later: “Satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”
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When he woke the next morning, his euphoria remained, though it was leavened now with his ubiquitous political calculation. He was convinced that Hitler would declare war on the United States and thus bring the Americans fully into the global conflict, but he worried that despite the tentative agreements of the ABC conference and the confirmation of those agreements at Argentia, the particular character of the Japanese attack might force Roosevelt to direct American wrath against Japan and relegate the war in Europe to a secondary theater. Churchill did not think that Roosevelt would willfully betray his commitment. He knew, however, that Roosevelt was an elected leader of a democratic society and necessarily sensitive to the mood and temper of his citizens. He thought there was “a serious danger that the United States might pursue the war against Japan in the Pacific and leave us to fight Germany.”
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Equally worrisome was the possibility that the Americans might slow or even halt the river of goods and supplies that came from the United States via Lend-Lease (or, as the British called it, Lease-Lend). Britain had become dependent on this supply line, and an interruption of it would threaten Britain’s survival as much as a triumph by the U-boats would. On this issue, Churchill’s concern was not unfounded. One of the many kneejerk reactions in the United States to the news of Pearl Harbor was a War Department order to stop all Lend-Lease shipments at once. In New York, thirty ships already loaded with war matériel for British armies in the Middle East received orders to postpone their departure. Alarmed, Churchill asked his friend Max Aitken, the British newspaper baron better known as Lord Beaverbrook, to call Harry Hopkins in Washington and see if he could
straighten things out. Hopkins told Beaverbrook not to worry, that this was just a temporary misunderstanding. Hopkins was sure that once the United States began to mobilize for the war, “we will undoubtedly greatly increase our amounts.” Still, the event reminded Churchill how precarious that supply line was, and how crucial it was to ensure its continuation. These considerations convinced him to make a personal visit to Washington as soon as possible.
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Churchill met with his war cabinet to get formal approval, then wrote to ask George VI for permission to leave the country in time of war. He made the reason clear: “We have … to be careful that our share of munitions and other aid which we are receiving from the United States does not suffer more than is, I fear, inevitable.” With the king’s approval in hand, Churchill sent a telegram to Roosevelt that same day inviting himself to Washington for a review of “the whole war plan in the light of reality and new facts.”
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Roosevelt was not initially enthusiastic. He may have wondered about the wisdom of conducting a high-level meeting with his British counterpart while America was still reeling from the initial Japanese onslaught. The U.S. Navy was trying to put together a relief force for the besieged garrison of tiny Wake Island in the mid-Pacific, and the Army was seeking reinforcements for the men of General Douglas MacArthur’s command in the Philippines. Pearl Harbor had quieted the isolationists, but they would become noisy again if they suspected that the British were coming over to assume direction of the war. Whatever his real concerns, Roosevelt couched his reservations in terms of anxiety for Churchill’s safety in crossing the still-dangerous Atlantic once again. Churchill waved off such considerations and refused to be dissuaded.

The very next day, Hitler declared war on the United States. In one of his long and rambling speeches to the Reichstag, he portrayed the entire war as a German response to plots and threats from all quarters. Poland, Britain, France, and Russia had all been poised to attack, he insisted, only to be thwarted by bold defensive action by brave German soldiers. As for Germany’s relationship with the United States, he cast it in personal terms as a confrontation between himself, a stalwart and hardworking champion of the German
Volk
, and the privileged and effete Roosevelt. “Roosevelt
comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the Democracies,” he told the Reichstag deputies. “I am only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry.” The rich and privileged Roosevelt had been a complete failure as president, Hitler insisted, and “the only salvation for him lay in diverting public attention from home to foreign policy.” As a result, “he himself began from March 1939 onwards, to meddle in European affairs which were no concern at all of the President of the U.S.A.” Germany had been patient, Hitler asserted, but she had borne it long enough. He did not ask for a declaration of war; he simply announced that Germany was now at war with the United States. The deputies cheered.
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The United States was in the war at last—“up to the neck and in to the death,” as Churchill put it—and the contingency plans of more than two years could be put into effect. Back in March, the tentative Anglo-American partners had determined that Germany was the most proximate threat and the most dangerous enemy. Would that decision still hold in the wake of Japanese infamy? To find out, Churchill prepared to cross the ocean for the second time in four months.
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CHURCHILL LEFT ENGLAND
on December 14, one week to the day after Pearl Harbor. He sailed on the battleship
Duke of York
, sister ship of the
Prince of Wales
, which had carried him to the Argentia conference four months earlier. Soon after that meeting off Newfoundland, Churchill had dispatched the
Prince of Wales
, along with the battlecruiser
Repulse
, to the Far East to bolster the defense of Malaya and Singapore. Then on December 10, the very day he telegraphed Roosevelt to invite himself to Washington, he learned that both of those ships had met their doom at the hands of a Japanese air attack. It was a severe blow. “In all the war,” Churchill wrote later, “I never received a more direct shock.” As elated as he had been to learn that Japan’s assault had brought the United States into the war, he now confronted the reality that the Japanese offensive had been astonishingly successful. With the demise of the mighty
Prince of Wales
, Churchill appreciated that throughout the Indian and Pacific Oceans, “Japan was supreme, and we were everywhere weak and naked.”
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The
Duke of York
was also a big ship, and Churchill took along a substantial coterie, including several men who would play key roles in the design and execution of Anglo-American war plans right up to the invasion of Normandy two and a half years later. Arguably the most important of them was Field Marshal Sir John Dill, who represented the British Army. Dill’s presence was a bit awkward since Churchill had only recently replaced him as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) with General Alan Brooke. Churchill had concluded that despite an exemplary war record, Dill was simply too hidebound and conventional to continue as head of the British Army. One reason for the move may have been Dill’s objection to giving the Mediterranean a higher priority in British strategic planning than the Far East. Then, too, Dill often declined to take seriously many of Churchill’s more off-the-wall suggestions about gimmick weapons and eccentric strategies. The prime minister initially planned to put Dill on the shelf as governor of India. After Pearl Harbor, however, he decided to take Dill with him on the trip to Washington, leaving Brooke behind in London to mind the shop. Churchill thought that if things worked out, Dill might remain in Washington to represent British interests there. It proved to be an inspired notion, for Dill had a calm and diplomatic presence that helped smooth over the occasional and inevitable bumps in the alliance partnership. He proved invaluable not only at the forthcoming conference but throughout the war until his death in 1944.
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Another member of the British delegation was Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, who represented the Royal Navy. Sixty-four years old and in poor health, Pound was visibly past his physical prime. He had an unsettling tendency to nod off at meetings, then abruptly sit up and make a well-argued point before slumping back into his chair and closing his eyes. Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal represented the Royal Air Force. Sixteen years younger than Pound, he was more active and outspoken in meetings. Portal’s Oxford degree gave him a certain intellectual cachet, and Marshall thought him “the best of the lot,” though it was sometimes hard to tell whether Portal’s principal constituency was Great Britain or the Royal Air Force. Another key member of the British team was Lord Beaverbrook, the wealthy Canadian-born newspaperman whom Churchill had put in charge
of the Ministry of Supply. A self-made man who had become the owner of both the
Daily Express
and the
Evening Standard
, the elfin-looking Beaver-brook was a dynamo of energy and organization who had dramatically increased British war production. His most important credential, however, was his personal friendship with the prime minister, and he played a similar role for Churchill that Hopkins did for Roosevelt.
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Churchill and his senior staff used the eight-day crossing to produce a number of position papers on various aspects of war management. Churchill wrote three of them himself, one each on the Atlantic, the Pacific, and strategic options for 1943. They were broad philosophical essays rather than specific plans (Hopkins, who was also on board, had warned him against arriving with detailed plans already in hand, for fear of triggering American suspicions). Since the Americans were still scrambling in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, they had not prepared any position papers at all, and as a result the British memos became the basis for subsequent discussion. Churchill’s goals for the conference were threefold: to reconfirm American commitment to the Germany-first strategy, to ensure the continuation of Lend-Lease goods, and to obtain approval for an early Allied campaign into North Africa.
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He need not have worried about the first two objectives. By now, the Americans were as committed to a Germany-first strategy as the British were. Nor was there any problem with the continuation of Lend-Lease, which, as Hopkins had predicted, soon increased rather than diminished. What was to prove the central issue, not only of the upcoming discussions in Washington but of Anglo-American conferences throughout the war, was how the defeat of Germany could best be secured. Churchill would soon discover that the American commitment to the Germany-first program made them eager to get on with it. For his part, Churchill did not oppose an eventual invasion of German-occupied Europe; indeed, he
placed such an operation at the center of his planning documents. As a young man, Churchill had been fond of declaring, “The only punch worth throwing was a knockout punch.” But not now. Not this year. He thought that if the Allies secured command of the seas and gained air superiority over the continent, and if they could produce the vast amount of materials necessary, an invasion of Europe might be possible “during the summer of 1943.” Even then, he wrote, the invasion would require “nourishing on a lavish scale,” and such an enterprise was simply not possible in 1942.
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