Franklin And Winston Part 2

I am glad you did the Marlboro volumes before this thing started-and I much enjoyed reading them.

With my sincere regards, Faithfully yours, Franklin D. Roosevelt Churchill recalled that he "responded with alacrity." The sea formed a common theme in their first months of correspondence as the new first lord tried to keep Roosevelt, who thought of himself as a shrewd old sailor, up-to-date on British maritime activity. Their first telephone conversation was about a naval crisis in the Atlantic. It was Thursday, October 5, 1939, the same day Roosevelt's letter reached London. Churchill was having supper in his apartment with the third sea lord, Rear Admiral Bruce Fraser, and the director of naval construction, Sir Stanley Goodall. As the three men were talking, the phone rang. Frank Sawyers, Churchill's valet, answered it and came into the dining room. "Who is it?" asked Churchill, who, Fraser said, "rather disliked telephones."

"I don't know, sir."

"Well, say I can't attend to it now."

"I think you ought to come, sir."

Churchill went to the phone-"rather testily," Fraser recalled. Churchill's guests were surprised to hear him say, "Yes, sir. . . . No, sir," to the caller. There were, Fraser said, "few people whom he would address as 'sir' and we wondered who on earth that was?" In a moment, Churchill returned.

"Do you know who that was?" Churchill said. "The President of the United States. It is remarkable to think of being rung up in this little flat in Victoria Street by the President himself in the midst of a great war. This is very important and I must go and see the Prime Minister at once."

The substance of the call says a good deal about the confusion of these first days of war. The Germans had sent word to Was.h.i.+ngton that an American liner then at sea, the Iroquois, was to be sunk by the British or the French as it neared the United States-and the British would then blame Germany for the attack to manufacture a provocation to bring America into the war. Listening to Roosevelt on the transatlantic line, Churchill believed that Berlin could blow the s.h.i.+p up (possibly by having planted a time bomb on board), kill the 566 pa.s.sengers, most of them American, and then say it was all Britain's fault, turning American public opinion against London and toward Germany at a critical moment. The liner was stopped, searched, and sent on safely: The rumors were unfounded.

The little episode of the Iroquois is largely lost to history, but the call marked the first time Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt had spoken to each other in more than two decades. Churchill's summons to the telephone foreshadowed much. Here was Roosevelt, genuinely concerned about the battles being fought on the Atlantic and in Europe, but far removed; here was Churchill, on the front lines, deferential and intrigued by the drama of a call in the night from the president.

ON THE LAST day of October, Lord Beaverbrook wrote Roosevelt to tell him Churchill was "just the most attractive Minister who ever fought a war on the lines of bitter and unrelenting hatred. . . . The prophets will say that, if Chamberlain falls, Churchill will succeed him, forming a Coalition Government."

Churchill and Roosevelt each had an agenda as they corresponded while Hitler held up pus.h.i.+ng west in the winter of 19391940-the months of the "phony war." Churchill, who referred to himself as "Naval Person" in his cables, noted: "I think I ought to send something more to my American friend in order to keep him interested in our affairs. . . . We must not let the liaison lapse." Roosevelt also wanted to keep different lines of communication open to a region in crisis. In December 1939, Joseph Kennedy visited Roosevelt in Was.h.i.+ngton. As Roosevelt had breakfast in bed in the White House, he made his motives for cultivating Churchill clear. "I'm giving him attention now," Roosevelt told Kennedy, "because of his possibilities of being P.M. and wanting to keep my hand in."

Beaverbrook's and Roosevelt's predictions about Churchill's path to power came true on May 10, 1940, as. .h.i.tler struck Western Europe. Roosevelt told his cabinet he "supposed Churchill was the best man that England had," Harold Ickes recalled, "even if he was drunk half of his time." It was hardly a warm endors.e.m.e.nt.

Still, Churchill had reached the summit. He was sixty-five years old. He had long believed that his fate and his nation's were intertwined; now they were. As Churchill went to bed at about three o'clock in the morning, he was "conscious of a profound sense of relief. At last I had the authority to give directions over the whole scene. I felt as if I were walking with Destiny, and that all my past life had been but a preparation for this hour and for this trial." For a moment, it seems, there was no fear, no uncertainty. "I thought I knew a good deal about it all," Churchill recalled, "and I was sure I should not fail."

ROOSEVELT WAS NOT so sure. Hitler was striking with speed and success across the west. However movingly Churchill talked about offering "blood, toil, tears and sweat"-the evocative phrase in his first speech to the House as prime minister-American officials were worried. In early March 1940, William C. Bullitt, the American amba.s.sador to France, had come in from Paris and given a gloomy report at a Was.h.i.+ngton dinner at Harold Ickes's house. "Bill has no use for Chamberlain, and almost none for Churchill," Ickes wrote in his diary. "He thinks that the British Government is in a bad way. There are no real leaders, as he sees it, in all of England in this time of grave crisis." Despite the good champagne, the conversation was grim. "Bill is not at all sure that England and France may not be utterly defeated in the present war," Ickes noted. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles had seen Churchill up close a month before. They had met in London, where Churchill had talked for nearly two hours-"a cascade of oratory, brilliant and always effective, interlarded with considerable wit." Yet Churchill's drinking bothered Welles (an irony, since Welles would fall from power over a scandal in which he drunkenly propositioned a railroad porter). Churchill, Welles said, was having a whiskey and soda, and "it was obvious that he had consumed a good many whiskies before I arrived." Frances Perkins recalled Roosevelt "was so uncertain about" Churchill that he wondered "what kind of a fellow" the new prime minister was. In those bleak days, that was still an open question.

ON WEDNESDAY, MAY 15, 1940, Churchill, calling himself "Former Naval Person," cabled Roosevelt. "Although I have changed my office, I am sure you would not wish me to discontinue our intimate, private correspondence," Churchill wrote. "As you are no doubt aware," he went on, the scene has darkened swiftly. The enemy have a marked preponderance in the air, and their new technique is making a deep impression upon the French. . . . The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood. We must expect, though it is not yet certain, that Mussolini will hurry in to share the loot of civilisation. We expect to be attacked here ourselves, both from the air and by parachute and air-borne troops in the near future, and are getting ready for them. If necessary, we shall continue the war alone, and we are not afraid of that.

Having tried to rea.s.sure Roosevelt about British resolve, Churchill raised the stakes: But I trust you realise, Mr President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated n.a.z.ified Europe established with astonis.h.i.+ng swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear. All I ask now is that you should proclaim non-belligerency, which would mean that you would help us with everything short of actually engaging armed forces.

Churchill then listed his "immediate needs": forty or fifty "of your older" destroyers, several hundred "of the latest types" of aircraft, along with antiaircraft equipment and ammunition, and steel. Churchill was not finished: Amid "reports of possible German parachute or air-borne descents in Ireland," he asked for the "visit of a United States Squadron to Irish Ports" and "to keep that j.a.panese dog quiet in the Pacific, using Singapore in any way convenient." It was a long wish list from a man fighting for survival and, from Churchill's point of view, an incisive and reasonable one. "We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can," Churchill wrote, "but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, you will give us the stuff all the same."

"I have just received your message," Roosevelt cabled back on Friday, May 17, "and I am sure it is unnecessary for me to say that I am most happy to continue our private correspondence as we have in the past." Roosevelt declined, however, to grant Churchill's most urgent requests. Addressing the question of destroyers, Roosevelt reminded Churchill about the American system of government. "As you know a step of that kind could not be taken except with the specific authorization of the Congress and I am not certain that it would be wise for that suggestion to be made to the Congress at this moment," Roosevelt said. There was some encouraging news in the cable: Roosevelt would try to arrange for "anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition" and for "the purchase of steel" while promising to ponder the Irish port question and to keep the fleet in Hawaii "for the time being."

BUT IT WAS not everything Churchill wanted as France was being eviscerated. Replying to Roosevelt's unsatisfying cable, he wrote on May 18: "I do not need to tell you about the gravity of what has happened. We are determined to persevere to the very end whatever the result of the great battle raging in France may be. We must expect in any case to be attacked here on the Dutch model before very long, and we hope to give a good account of ourselves. But if American a.s.sistance is to play any part it must be available soon."

Henry Wallace, Roosevelt's liberal vice president who served from 1941 to 1945, once told John Gunther that "what went on inside FDR's head" was all that mattered. Now the president was turning a dark prospect over in his mind: What would happen if Britain fell? On the evening of May 14, trying to rea.s.sure Joseph Kennedy, Churchill said that the nation would not surrender even if the Germans overran the island. "Why, the Government will move to Canada and take the fleet and fight on," Churchill told Kennedy.

In a subsequent talk with Lord Lothian, the British amba.s.sador to the United States, Roosevelt pressed the point: What would Churchill do about the Royal Navy if Hitler conquered England? Would the prime minister really send his s.h.i.+ps to America or to Canada, to keep them out of German hands? The question was a sign that for all his sympathies with London-the president and Henry Morgenthau scrounged up rifles, ammunition, and machine guns for Britain in May-Roosevelt had his doubts about Churchill's chances against Hitler.

Roosevelt was in a bind. In a Gallup poll published on October 22, 1939-seven weeks after Hitler struck Poland-95 percent of Americans wanted to stay out of the fight, but 62 percent said yes when asked if they thought "the United States should do everything possible to help England and France win the war except go to war ourselves." To that end, in November the president signed the 1939 Neutrality Act, which established the principle of "cash and carry" for belligerent countries. The law, as the historian David Reynolds put it, "was presented as a peace measure, and there is little doubt that Roosevelt genuinely believed it would not bring America into the European war. But there is also no doubt that he intended it as an unneutral act. Cash and carry was intended to benefit Britain and France-countries with substantial foreign exchange reserves and large merchant fleets." Soon, however, there were fears in the United States that aid to the Allies might come at a steep cost, leaving Was.h.i.+ngton even more unprepared in the face of a victorious Germany, which had outspent America in terms of combat munitions production six times over from 1935 to 1940.

That, then, was where the president and the prime minister stood in the middle of May 1940. Roosevelt was elusive, trying to balance America's own needs with Britain's, while Churchill was at once determined and desperate. Churchill longed for anything he could get from Roosevelt-guns, s.h.i.+ps, whatever. He got so much less than he wanted, however, that when it came time to tell the story of the summer and fall of 1940 in his memoirs, Churchill would write that the "Theme of the Volume" was "How the British people held the fort ALONE till those who hitherto had been half blind were half ready." He was talking about Roosevelt and America. Still, the fort had to be held. While Churchill fought to keep Britain free, he had to resist pressures for a settled peace in the short term and pull Roosevelt into his camp for the long run. And in many ways the immediate future of democracy depended on how deftly Winston Churchill could simultaneously seduce Roosevelt and stonewall Hitler.

AS FRANCE CONTINUED to face overwhelming German attacks on land and from the air on May 18, Churchill's son, Randolph, was on leave from the north of England, where the young man was in military training. Going straight to see his father, Randolph found Churchill standing nearly naked in front of a shaving mirror in a silk unders.h.i.+rt. "It was the only thing he would wear to sleep in, and it left nothing to the imagination," recalled Winston S. Churchill, the prime minister's grandson.

"Sit down, dear boy, and read the papers while I finish shaving," Churchill told Randolph. Here is Randolph's recollection of the ensuing conversation, dictated when he was working on his father's biography in 1963: I did as told. After two or three minutes of hacking away, he half turned and said: "I think I see my way through." He resumed his shaving. I was astounded, and said: "Do you mean that we can avoid defeat?" (which seemed credible) or "beat the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds?" (which seemed incredible).

He flung his Valet razor in to the basin, swung around, and said:-"Of course I mean we can beat them."

Me: "Well, I'm all for it, but I don't see how you can do it."

By this time he had dried and sponged his face and turning round to me, said with great intensity:-"I shall drag the United States in."

It would not prove easy. Churchill was still a mystery to Roosevelt and his circle. That summer, Sumner Welles told Henry Morgenthau that Churchill was "a drunken sot" and a "third or fourth rate man."

Churchill scheduled a broadcast for Sunday evening, May 19. When he was at his best, noted the writer and member of Parliament A. P. Herbert, Churchill could say "the fine true thing" with a force that "was like an organ filling the church, and we all went out refreshed and resolute to do or die." In his youth, Churchill had been supremely confident about his own rhetorical gifts. "Those Greeks and Romans, they are so overrated," Violet Bonham Carter remembered hearing a younger Churchill remark. "I have said just as good things myself. They owe their reputation to the fact that they got in first with everything." In 1940, there was no c.o.c.kiness; the stirring pa.s.sages of defiance in his wartime speeches produce chills decades later, but part of his rhetorical magic was that Churchill was no mindless cheerleader. He told his audiences the story of the war, in detail, and he made it very clear that while he did not doubt victory would come, he also had no doubt it would come only with sacrifice and blood.

He had slipped away to Chartwell earlier that May Sunday to soak up some sun and feed his swan and goldfish. He was, Colville noted, "full of fight and thrives on crisis and adversity." The courage and pluck Colville noticed informed Churchill's broadcast: Our task is not only to win the battle, but to win the war. After this battle in France abates its force, there will come the battle for our Islands, for all that Britain is and all that Britain means. In that supreme emergency we shall not hesitate to take every step-even the most drastic-to call forth from our people the last ounce and inch of effort of which they are capable. The interests of property, the hours of labour, are nothing compared to the struggle for life and honour, for right and freedom, to which we have vowed ourselves. . . .

If this is one of the most awe-striking periods in the long history of France and Britain it is also beyond all doubt the most sublime. Side by side, unaided except by their kith and kin in the great Dominions, and by the wide Empires which rest beneath their s.h.i.+eld, the British and French peoples have advanced to rescue not Europe only but mankind from the foulest and most soul-destroying tyranny which has ever darkened and stained the pages of history. Behind them gather a group of shattered States and bludgeoned races, the Czechs, the Poles, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dutch, the Belgians-upon all of whom the long night of barbarism will descend unbroken by even a star of hope, unless we conquer-as conquer we must-as conquer we shall.

Roosevelt's reaction to the performance-and to most of Churchill's wartime broadcasts-is unrecorded, but Eleanor's impression is telling. Churchill's speeches, she said, "were a tonic to us here in the United States as well as to his own people."

Her husband probably would have agreed with her on that, but not on this: Eleanor found Churchill a more honest politician than Roosevelt. "To explain to one's country that there must be a long period while the military forces are being trained and armed, during which production will be one of the most important factors, and that meanwhile people must be patient and hope at best 'to hold the line' is no easy or popular thing to do," Eleanor recalled. "I always had great admiration for the way in which Mr. Churchill did this. In some ways he was more blunt with the people of Great Britain than my husband ever was with us." She did give Roosevelt one benefit of the doubt: "The British people were closer to the danger and I suppose for that very reason could better understand the blunt approach."

CHURCHILL HAD BARELY finished his speech before he returned to the frustrating business of winning over Roosevelt. At Admiralty House, where the Churchills were still in residence, the prime minister worked on a message to the president. In it, Churchill painted his darkest portrait yet of the dangers he faced, mentioning Roosevelt and Lothian's exchange about the future if the Germans carried the day: With regard to the closing part of your talk with Lothian, our intention is, whatever happens, to fight on to the end in this Island, and, provided we can get the help for which we ask, we hope to run them very close in the air battles in view of individual superiority. Members of the present administration would likely go down during this process should it result adversely, but in no conceivable circ.u.mstances will we consent to surrender. If members of the present Administration were finished and others came in to parley amid the ruins, you must not be blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the Fleet, and, if this country was left by the United States to its fate, no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants. Excuse me, Mr President, putting this nightmare bluntly. Evidently I could not answer for my successors, who in utter despair and helplessness might well have to accommodate themselves to the German will.

Churchill closed on a cheerful note. "However, there is happily no need at present to dwell upon such ideas. Once more thanking you for your goodwill." The real "star of hope" Churchill had alluded to in his broadcast was Roosevelt, and though the star seemed distant, the prime minister thought a.s.sertions of confidence more likely to impress the president than expressions of gloom-even if gloom was the emotion that more closely matched the reality of the moment.

Finis.h.i.+ng the letter, Churchill lost his temper. "Considering the soothing words he always uses to America, and in particular to the President," Colville wrote, "I was somewhat taken aback when he said to me, 'Here's a telegram for those b.l.o.o.d.y Yankees. Send it off tonight.' " His annoyance with "those b.l.o.o.d.y Yankees"-and especially with Roosevelt-is not surprising. Why, Churchill could be forgiven for thinking, can't he see what I am saying?

ONE OF THE reasons Roosevelt was choosing not to do more-aside from his uncertainty over whether Churchill was worth banking on-was evident the same day Churchill spoke. Over the CBS Radio network, Charles A. Lindbergh, the celebrated pilot who had become a leading spokesman for isolation, expressed the feelings of millions who did not want to intervene in another European war. "We need not fear a foreign invasion unless American peoples bring it on through their own quarreling and meddling with affairs abroad," Lindbergh told the country. Then he took a shot at the interventionist elite-men like Felix Frankfurter, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Harold Ickes, and Henry Morgenthau-which was urging Roosevelt to engage. "The only reason that we are in danger of becoming involved in this war is because there are powerful elements in America who desire us to take part. They represent a small minority of the American people, but they control much of the machinery of influence and propaganda. They seize every opportunity to push us closer to the edge."

Despite its narrow-mindedness-the populist appeal to fear "powerful elements" who "control much of the machinery of influence"-Lindbergh's speech did not sound as far-out then as it does now. Roosevelt had been cruising on the Potomac River on the Sunday Churchill and Lindbergh spoke and was handed a copy of Lindbergh's remarks when he arrived back at the White House. Yet, The New York Times noted, "no comment was forthcoming from any White House source." Happy isolationists, however, were delighted to weigh in. "Colonel Lindbergh has given a message to the American people such as a patriotic American President should give," Ma.s.sachusetts Congressman George Holden Tinkham told the Times. "No political intervention into the affairs of Europe or Asia." In many parts of America, isolation was what we would later call the conventional wisdom.

Elite public opinion ran the other way, led by the Kansas newspaper editor William Allen White's Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and by the Century Group-named for members who often met at the Century a.s.sociation on West 43rd Street in Manhattan. Publis.h.i.+ng "A Summons to Speak Out" three weeks after Lindbergh's address, the Century Group declared: "The United States should immediately give official recognition to the fact and to the logic of the situation-by declaring that a state of war exists between this country and Germany. Only in this const.i.tutional manner can the energies be ma.s.sed which are indispensable to the successful prosecution of a program of defense." Strong words, but they came in the same weeks as a poll that, the historians William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason wrote, "indicated that only 7.7 percent of the population was in favor of entering the war at once and only 19 percent believed that the country should intervene if the defeat of the Allies appeared certain, as against 40 percent that opposed American partic.i.p.ation under any circ.u.mstances." Such numbers were among the reasons Roosevelt moved with care. "Although President is our best friend," Churchill told Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King in these weeks, "no practical help has been forthcoming from the United States as yet." Churchill was not wrong to put his hopes on the president, but given the scope of the task Britain faced-to defeat, or at least not lose to, a dominant Hitler-it is understandable that the prime minister would also feel his American counterpart did not quite appreciate the pressures London faced.

AS MAY WOUND DOWN, a substantial Allied force-about four hundred thousand men with all their equipment and munitions-were retreating to Dunkirk. To have lost the soldiers there, trapped between the Third Reich and the Channel, would have cut the heart out of the Allies at the moment of Hitler's greatest strength. The House of Commons, Churchill said in the last week of May, "should prepare itself for hard and heavy tidings. I have only to add that nothing which may happen in this battle can in any way relieve us of our duty to defend the world cause to which we have vowed ourselves; nor should it destroy our confidence in our power to make our way, as on former occasions in our history, through disaster and through grief to the ultimate defeat of our enemies."

In Was.h.i.+ngton Roosevelt was grave. "Tonight there was no levity," the presidential speechwriter Sam Rosenman said of an evening gathering that week. "There was no small talk. The President was reading dispatches which were being brought in to him from time to time by a White House usher. He mixed c.o.c.ktails rather mechanically, as though his mind were thousands of miles away-as, of course, it was." The reports were of the retreat to Dunkirk and the plight of France. "It was a dejected dinner group," Rosenman recalled.

On May 27 came a disturbing cable from Joseph Kennedy. "Only a miracle can save the BEF from being wiped out or, as I said yesterday, surrender," Kennedy told Roosevelt. "I suspect that the Germans would be willing to make peace with both the French and the British now-of course on their own terms but on terms that would be a great deal better than they would be if the war continues. . . . I realize that this is a terrific telegram, but there is no question that it's in the air here. The result of that will be a row amongst certain elements in the Cabinet here; Churchill, Attlee, and others will want to fight to the death but there will be other members who realize that physical destruction of men and property in England will not be a proper offset to a loss of pride." Kennedy was a defeatist, but he was not far off the mark in his a.s.sessment of what was happening at the highest tiers of government in London. Roosevelt had been told that Churchill might not be up to the job. Perhaps the critics were right. Perhaps, once again, the British would cave in to Hitler.

In a meeting of the war cabinet in London the next day, May 28, Lord Halifax, then the foreign secretary, suggested that the time might have come to use Italy to discover what German peace terms might be. (The day before, Colville had told his diary that "there are signs that Halifax is being defeatist.") Churchill resisted; talks might be a "slippery slope," he said, to German domination. Halifax said that he did not see why the prime minister thought "trying out the possibilities of mediation . . . was so wrong." This was a crucial moment for Churchill's leaders.h.i.+p. He was not yet the man of myth he would become. Churchill, the solemn diplomat Alexander Cadogan said in these days, was "too rambling and romantic and sentimental and temperamental." Could he stave off a move toward a settlement?

As they debated whether to negotiate, Neville Chamberlain, who was now lord president, became an important convert to Churchill's view, weighing in against further appeas.e.m.e.nt, expressing his position with convoluted understatement. According to the minutes of the meeting, "The Lord President said that, on a dispa.s.sionate survey, it was right to remember that the alternative to fighting on nevertheless involved a considerable gamble." As usual, Churchill was more declarative, saying that "nations which went down fighting rose again, but those which surrendered tamely were finished." Halifax came back at Churchill. "The Foreign Secretary said that nothing in his suggestion could even remotely be described as ultimate capitulation," according to the minutes. Churchill stood strong, replying that "the chances of decent terms being offered to us at the present time were a thousand to one against." But the door was still open. The decision to cut off movement toward a settlement was not final.

AT THIS POINT the war ministers left the room, and the full cabinet came in to meet with the prime minister. Hugh Dalton, the minister of economic warfare, recalled the scene with Churchill: "He was determined to prepare public opinion for bad tidings, and it would of course be said, and with some truth, that what was now happening in Northern France would be the greatest British military defeat for many centuries. We must now be prepared for the sudden turning of the war against this island, and prepared also for other events of great gravity in Europe. No countenance should be given publicly to the view that France might soon collapse, but we must not allow ourselves to be taken by surprise by any events. It might indeed be said that it would be easier to defend this island alone than to defend this island plus France, and if it was seen throughout the world that it was the former, there would be an immense wave of feeling, not least in the USA which, having done nothing much to help us so far, might even enter the war."

Then Churchill turned to the crucial question left hanging in the war cabinet. "It was idle to think that, if we tried to make peace now, we should get better terms from Germany than if we went on and fought it out. The Germans would demand our fleet-that would be called 'disarmament'-our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state, though a British Government which would be Hitler's puppet would be set up. . . . And where should we be at the end of all that? On the other side, we had immense reserves and advantages. Therefore, he said, 'We shall go on and we shall fight it out, here or elsewhere, and if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.' " He had them: "There was a murmur of approval round the table. . . . No one expressed even the faintest flicker of dissent."

Buoyed by the session, Churchill returned to the war cabinet that evening and told the ministers what had happened. "They had not expressed alarm at the position in France," the minutes reported, "but had expressed the greatest satisfaction when he had told them that there was no chance of our giving up the struggle."

The significance of the moment Dalton described is that Churchill found others shared his vision, once it was voiced, of holding fast no matter what the cost. In the closed circle of the war cabinet, pounded by terrible report after terrible report, there had been uncertainty about whether he could fend off the drift to exploring a deal with Hitler. The determination of the larger group trumped the tentativeness of the smaller, and Churchill fulfilled his role as leader by disentangling himself from defeatism-one of his singular achievements at the end of May 1940.

FROM DUNKIRK, England rescued nearly 340,000 British and French soldiers, but in truth it was only the briefest of respites from the continuing German air and land victories in France. In a speech to the House on June 4, 1940, Churchill said: 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 n.a.z.i 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 even 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 G.o.d's good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

In G.o.d's good time. Though Churchill's words on this occasion are among the most enduring in the history of oratory, the pa.s.sage is in fact more a prayer than a proclamation, for it climaxes on a promise he lacks the power to fulfill on his own. In London difficult days turned into weeks, which then turned into months. Yet Churchill made progress with this address, rea.s.suring those around Roosevelt-including Roosevelt himself. "We understood the kind of courage and tenacity that Winston Churchill was beginning to put into words," Eleanor recalled, "words that expressed the spirit of the British people in the months following Dunkirk."

"I have no one but you to break the loneliness of bustling & bustled existence"

The Churchills on the Thames during the Blitz, September 25, 1940 LESS THAN A week later, on June 10, Italy entered the war on the German side. Though allied with Hitler since 1938 in a "Pact of Steel," Benito Mussolini had hung back during the Blitzkrieg; now Mussolini fulfilled a promise he had made to Hitler aboard a train at the Brenner Pa.s.s in March 1940 and declared war on France and England. Roosevelt was scheduled to travel to Charlottesville to deliver the commencement address at the University of Virginia Law School, where his son Franklin Jr. was getting a degree. Eleanor thought the event strange, an example of the intermingling of the personal and the political for powerful families. "It was a curious trip: we were all there; a trip to one's son's commencement is normal; but that was not a normal and happy occasion," Eleanor recalled. "The times were fraught with promise of evil. Franklin's address was not just a commencement address; it was a speech to the nation on an event that had brought us one step nearer to total war."

A raucous crowd cheered Roosevelt as he talked tough about Europe. The day was rainy, and the president, wearing a crimson academic hood, spoke to the university in the gymnasium. "On this 10th day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor," Roosevelt said, starkly portraying Italy as an aggressor in the same cla.s.s as Germany. "On this 10th day of June, 1940, in this university founded by the first great American teacher of democracy, we send forth our prayers and our hopes to those beyond the seas who are maintaining with magnificent valor their battle for freedom." There were rebel yells; the crowd was with him. "In our American unity, we will pursue two obvious and simultaneous courses: we will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation; and, at the same time, we will harness and speed up the use of those resources in order that we ourselves in the Americas may have equipment and training equal to the task of any emergency and every defense," Roosevelt said. "Signs and signals call for speed-full speed ahead." Listening on the radio, Churchill could hardly control himself.

Could his prayers have been answered? Cabling Roosevelt, Churchill a.s.sumed that his wooing had worked. "We all listened to you last night and were fortified by the grand scope of your declaration. Your statement that the material aid of the United States will be given to the Allies in their struggle is a strong encouragement in a dark but not unhopeful hour. Everything must be done to keep France in the fight and to prevent any idea of the fall of Paris, should it occur, becoming the occasion of any kind of parley. The hope with which you inspire them may give them the strength to persevere. . . . I send you my heartfelt thanks and those of my colleagues for all you are doing and seeking to do for what we may now, indeed, call the Common Cause."

The next day, before Roosevelt could reply to this optimistic cable, Churchill, who had just returned from French General Headquarters, told him France was teetering. "Of course I made it clear to the French that we should continue whatever happened, and that we thought Hitler could not win the war or the mastery of the world until he has disposed of us, which has not been found easy in the past, and which perhaps will not be found easy now," Churchill wrote Roosevelt. "I made it clear to the French that we had good hopes of victory, and anyhow had no doubts whatever of what our duty was. If there is anything you can say publicly or privately to the French, now is the time."

EMBOLDENED BY HIS day at Charlottesville, Roosevelt may have read too much into the enthusiasm of his commencement audience, for the president was swept up in the spirit of Churchill's telegram and took his advice. In a message for Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, Roosevelt told the French, "As I have already stated to you and to Mr. Churchill, this Government is doing everything in its power to make available to the Allied Governments the material they so urgently require, and our efforts to do still more are being redoubled. This is so because of our faith in and our support for the ideals for which the Allies are fighting."

Flying back and forth across the Channel in a hurried series of meetings with the French, Churchill begged Roosevelt to publicize the text of his telegram to Reynaud. "Mr President," Churchill wrote in a long and carefully crafted cable, "I must tell you that it seems to me absolutely vital that this message should be published tomorrow 14th June in order that it may play the decisive part in turning the course of world history."

Roosevelt refused. Churchill was crushed. Roosevelt had slipped from his grasp. The president did seem pained about staying out of the fray as France prepared to fall, telling Churchill defensively: "I appreciate fully the significance and weight of the considerations set forth in your message."

In France, defeat was at hand. Writing to Roosevelt on the evening of June 15, Churchill went as far as he dared and called Roosevelt's strategy into question-respectfully, of course.

I understand all your difficulties with American public opinion and Congress, but events are moving downward at a pace where they will pa.s.s beyond the control of American public opinion when at last it is ripened. Have you considered what offers. .h.i.tler may choose to make to France? He may say, "surrender the Fleet intact and I will leave you Alsace-Lorraine," or alternatively, "if you do not give me your s.h.i.+ps I will destroy your towns." I am personally convinced that America will in the end go to all lengths, but this moment is supremely critical for France. A declaration that the United States will if necessary enter the war might save France. Failing that, in a few days French resistance may have crumbled and we shall be left alone.

Although the present Government and I personally would never fail to send the Fleet across the Atlantic if resistance was beaten down here, a point may be reached in the struggle where the present ministers no longer have control of affairs and when very easy terms could be obtained for the British Islands by their becoming a va.s.sal state of the Hitler empire. A pro-German Government would certainly be called into being to make peace and might present to a shattered or a starving nation an almost irresistible case for entire submission to the n.a.z.i will. The fate of the British Fleet, as I have already mentioned to you, would be decisive on the future of the United States, because if it were joined to the Fleets of j.a.pan, France and Italy and the great resources of German industry, overwhelming sea-power would be in Hitler's hands. He might, of course, use it with a merciful moderation. On the other hand, he might not. This revolution in sea-power might happen very quickly and certainly long before the United States would be able to prepare against it. If we go down you may have a United States of Europe under the n.a.z.i command far more numerous, far stronger, far better armed than the New World.

I know well, Mr President, that your eye will already have searched these depths, but I feel I have the right to place on record the vital manner in which American interests are at stake in our battle and that of France.

Before Roosevelt could respond, it was over. Shortly after dispatching his warning, Churchill cabled again to say that unless the United States a.s.sured France America would enter the war, "the French will very quickly ask for an armistice." Which they did.

TO CHURCHILL, it seemed as though Britain would have to go it alone, and a German invasion could be at hand. One June evening at dinner with Clementine and Randolph's wife, Pamela, who was six months pregnant, Churchill seemed lost in his thoughts until suddenly his eyes locked with his daughter-in-law's. "If the Hun comes, I am counting on each of you to take one with you before you go," the prime minister said.

"But Papa," Pamela replied, "I don't have a gun, and even if I did, I wouldn't know how to use it."

"But my dear," Churchill said, "you may go to the kitchen"-at this the prime minister raised his fist high in the air in a menacing gesture-"and grab a carving knife."

On June 18, Churchill briefed the nation on the crisis it now faced without the French in the fight.

Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our inst.i.tutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

After the broadcast, Churchill "was furious because the morning papers, which he likes to see before going to bed, had not arrived," Colville noted. "In his emotion he upset his whisky and soda over all his papers."

Churchill was under the severest stress. He had been prime minister for thirty-nine days. In this brief span had come the near miss with the defeatists, Dunkirk, German victories in Norway, the collapse of the Low Countries and of France, and the unsuccessful appeals to Roosevelt to intervene to keep France in the war. Given to sharp swings between optimism and pessimism, Churchill could at times be hard to work with-and for. "He was an alarming master," recalled John Martin, who came to work for him as a private secretary on the eve of Dunkirk. "For a newcomer it was often difficult to understand his instructions. His speech was hard to follow. Only after months did one acquire skill to interpret what at first seemed inarticulate grunts or single words thrown out without explanation. One had to learn his private allusions, as when he referred to 'that moon-faced man in the Foreign Office' or identified one of his own Minutes by its opening words like a Papal encyclical."

There would be explosions, then forgiveness. "On one of those early nights, when I was working alone with him long after midnight and the more experienced hands had left," Martin said, "everything went wrong: I knew none of the answers and could find none of the papers he wanted. At last he rose wearily to go upstairs to bed but not before he had laid his hand kindly on my shoulder and said he was sorry there had been no time in the rush of these days to get to know me. 'You know,' he added, 'I may seem very fierce, but I am fierce only with one man-Hitler.' " Gracious, but the pressure was always on.

Clementine was keeping a concerned eye on her husband. Mrs. Churchill, Colville noted, was "the only person who was never, in any circ.u.mstances, even the slightest bit overawed or afraid" of her husband, and she showed that at the end of June 1940 when she wrote him a candid and loving letter. "My Darling," Clementine began, I hope you will forgive me if I tell you something that I feel you ought to know.

One of the men in your entourage (a devoted friend) has been to me & told me that there is a danger of your being generally disliked by your colleagues & subordinates because of your rough sarcastic & overbearing manner-It seems your Private Secretaries have agreed to behave like schoolboys & "take what's coming to them" & then escape out of your presence shrugging their shoulders-Higher up, if an idea is suggested (say at a conference) you are supposed to be so contemptuous that presently no ideas, good or bad, will be forthcoming. I was astonished & upset because in all these years I have been accustomed to all those who have worked with & under you, loving you-I said this & I was told "No doubt it's the strain"- My darling Winston-I must confess that I have noticed a deterioration in your manner; & you are not so kind as you used to be.

It is for you to give the Orders & if they are bungled-except for the King the Archbishop of Canterbury & the Speaker you can sack anyone & everyone-Therefore with this terrific power you must combine urbanity, kindness and if possible Olympic calm. You used to quote:-"On ne regne sur les ames que par le calme" [One can only reign over souls with calmness]-I cannot bear that those who serve the Country & yourself should not love you as well as admire and respect you- Besides you won't get the best results by irascibility & rudeness. They will breed either dislike or a slave mentality-(Rebellion in War time being out of the question!) Please forgive your loving devoted & watchful Clemmie I wrote this at Chequers last Sunday, tore it up, but here it is now.

No reply exists, but Churchill may have taken his wife's words to heart, for, as Mary Soames wrote, most of the men around him then-Colville and Martin among them-became lifelong Churchillians.

AS HE WATCHED Churchill from Was.h.i.+ngton, Roosevelt had not decided whether Churchill's unflinching talk was a harbinger of greatness or eloquent bombast on the road to disaster. Churchill always sounded confident. "For forty years of public life," wrote the author and scientist C. P. Snow, "the orthodox remark in England was: 'Churchill? Brilliant, of course. But no judgment.' "

In late June, Roosevelt found himself reading a recommendation from the joint planners of the War and Navy Departments arguing that "further release of war material now in the hands of our armed forces will seriously weaken our present state of defense." General George C. Marshall, the man who had been a.s.signed the task of transforming America's unprepared military (even the Dutch were stronger), said: "There was no doubt that we had sold so generously to the Allied Powers that our own stocks were below the safety point. One could argue that by giving more aid to Britain and Canada we would be increasing our own defensive strength. That might be true, but it was not provable, and if Britain were defeated the Army and the Administration could never justify to the American people the risk they had taken." Roosevelt would not give up the fight to get aid to Britain-far from it-but he would move slowly, and Churchill's problem was that there seemed no time to spare. And despite the prime minister's warm words of thanks for the help that did arrive, what seemed generous in Was.h.i.+ngton-sales of what arms and equipment the administration could dredge up and which often got to the Allies over isolationist objections in Congress-seemed less so in London.

IT WAS NOW JULY. London had to decide what to do about the French fleet, which the Allies could not allow to fall into German or Italian hands. Churchill realized he had to destroy the French s.h.i.+ps, which were in port at Oran in Algiers, in French North Africa. It was a painful moment. "The night he decided to bombard the French fleet in Oran, it was 2 o'clock in the morning before he came to his decision," recalled Lord Beaverbrook. "He had to stand alone. . . . He arrived at his own conclusion. Immediately after reaching it he went out of the Cabinet room into the garden at No. 10 Downing Street. He marched up and down the lawn and a high wind was blowing-a very high wind. The night was dark. There were no lights anywhere and he found his way up and down the lawn because he knew the ground so thoroughly. He was terribly disturbed and only recovered after a few minutes of aggressive and vigorous exercise."

Roosevelt was watching with approval. The action at Oran "served forcibly to underscore Churchill's defiant a.s.surance that 'we will fight them in the streets' and 'never surrender,' " wrote Robert Sherwood. "It exerted a particular effect on Roosevelt." Churchill might really hold out.

Churchill kept a sharp eye on his own nation's interests. British code breakers at Bletchley Park were beginning to figure out how to decipher German radio messages sent in its "Enigma" cipher, intelligence Churchill guarded carefully. In July Roosevelt dispatched Colonel "Wild Bill" Donovan, founder of the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency), to a.s.sess Britain's chances, and the spymaster returned with a bullish report and an understanding to share some intelligence. Churchill, though, played his hand shrewdly, protecting several different kinds of technology. "Are we going to throw all our secrets into the American lap, and see what they give us in exchange?" he asked Lord Ismay, his liaison to the military chiefs of staff, on July 17. "If so, I am against it. It would be very much better to go slow, as we have far more to give than they."

CHURCHILL'S NOTES FOR a speech to a secret session of the House on June 20 indicate his developing strategy. He dictated them to a secretary; they are fragmentary but revealing, laying out the course of the war, his fears and his hopes.

If Hitler fails to invade or destroy Britain he has lost the war.

I do not consider only the severities of the winter in Europe.

I look to superiority in Air power in the future.

Transatlantic reinforcements.

If get through next 3 months get through next 3 years.

It may well be our fine Armies have not said goodbye to the Continent of Europe.

If enemy coastline extends from the Arctic to the Mediterranean and we retain sea-power and a growing Air power it is evident that Hitler master of a starving, agonized and surging Europe; will have his dangers as well as we.

But all depends upon winning this battle here in Britain, now this summer.

If we do, the prospects of the future will expand, and we may look forward and make our plans for 1941 and 1942 and that is what we are doing.

Att.i.tude of United States.

Nothing will stir them like fighting in England.

No good suggesting to them we are down and out.

The heroic struggle of Britain best chance of bringing them in.

Anyhow they have promised fullest aid in materials, munitions.

A tribute to Roosevelt . . .

All depends upon our resolute bearing and holding out until Election issues are settled there.

If we can do so, I cannot doubt a whole English-speaking world will be in line together THE POLITICIAN IN him had put his finger on what was occupying the president. It would not much matter what Roosevelt thought if he was in retirement at Hyde Park in January 1941. Before the war broke out, Roosevelt signaled his intention to move aside. In 1938, he had begun to build Top Cottage, a hideaway at Hyde Park. (Eleanor already had a separate house on the estate, Val-Kill.) He thought he would write magazine pieces and arranged a $75,000 annual deal with Collier's.

"I think my husband was torn," Eleanor recalled of the decision to run again. "He would often talk about the reasons against a third term," but "there was a great sense of responsibility" and "the great feeling that possibly he was the only one who was equipped and trained and cognizant not only of the people who were involved in the future, and in what was going to happen, but of every phase of the situation."