Alone, 1932-1940

  Actually they had met once, at Gray’s Inn, London, on July 29, 1918, when both were guests at a dinner for the War Cabinet, though Churchill—to FDR’s annoyance—did not remember it. Roosevelt professed to have enjoyed Churchill’s subsequent books, and, as noted earlier, he had read While England Slept, though the president rarely read anything except newspapers; he liked to learn the views of contemporary writers by inviting them to his home and listening to them. Considering Churchill’s present responsibilities that was impractical now, but already Roosevelt was pondering ways to manage a rendezvous, the more dramatic the better. He never doubted he could do it. After overcoming his appalling paralysis to become the greatest figure in American political history, he felt he could do anything. If he wanted something, he reached for it. No president has ever had a broader reach, and now his hand was extended across the Atlantic.8

  He knew he could buy peace for a generation of Americans, but the more he pondered the character of the regime in Berlin, the more convinced he became that the next U.S. generation would lie at Hitler’s mercy. On September 1, as the Wehrmacht’s panzer tracks chewed their way toward Warsaw, Phelps Adams of the New York Sun had asked FDR: “Can we stay out of it?” Privately, Roosevelt was doubtful, but after a long pause he had replied: “I not only sincerely hope so, but I believe we can, and every effort will be made by this Administration to do so.” This amounted to duplicity, but the president could not become a great wartime leader unless he won a third term the following year. If he were blunt now he would lose then. However, on Sunday, the day Britain entered the war, he had sounded an unmistakable knell. It was “easy for you and me to shrug our shoulders,” he told his countrymen in a fireside chat, and to dismiss “conflicts thousands of miles from the continental United States” as irrelevant to Americans. But “passionately though we may desire detachment, we are forced to realize that every word that comes through the air, every ship that sails the seas, every battle that is fought does affect the American future.” In 1914 Woodrow Wilson had told the Senate that the “United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name…. We must be impartial in thought as well as in action.” FDR now declared that impossible: “The nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind and conscience.”9

  His own mind was open and his conscience at peace. In time his commitment would be clear to the entire world. He had already planned one of his bold, ingenious strokes, renouncing freedom of the seas for Americans. “Danger zones” would be proclaimed, and U.S. citizens and ships would be barred from them; there would be no Lusitania this time. The isolationism bloc could find no flaw in that. But if they mulled it over, they would see that the policy in effect gave a free hand to Britain and France, who were controlling the seas despite German submarines. A further step came in November 1939, when the U.S. Neutrality Act was amended to permit the sale of arms to belligerents on a cash-and-carry basis. Although theoretically applying equally to all, cash and carry in fact favored whoever dominated the seas; now the Allies could place large orders with American munitions manufacturers and then sail over to take delivery. The impact of cash and carry on the Reich would be anything but neutral, and the orders would mean thousands of jobs for Americans. In all events, FDR intended to intervene personally whenever he could help the democracies and hurt Hitler.10

  If Roosevelt had judged him right, Churchill was the man with whom he could join hands. Even before his phone call to Morpeth Mansions, he had sent the Admiralty’s first lord an overture via the American diplomatic pouch. Dated September 11 it began: “My dear Churchill:—It is because you and I occupied similar positions in the World War [FDR had been assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy] that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty.” Winston—and of course Chamberlain, he added as an afterthought—should know that “I shall at all times welcome it, if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about,” sending “sealed letters through your pouch or my pouch.” The president ended gracefully, “I am glad you did the Marlborough volumes before this thing started—and I much enjoyed reading them.”11

  To Winston, who had looked westward when the appeasers were looking to Berlin, this letter bore enormous implications. Laying it before the War Cabinet, he pointed out that the president, as commander in chief, controlled the movements of all American naval vessels and could “relieve the Royal Navy of a great load of responsibility.” By executive order he could declare a safety belt around the Americas, which would make it impossible for the Germans to attack His Majesty’s merchantmen “approaching, say, Jamaica or Trinidad, without risking hostilities with the United States.” The War Cabinet approved his reply, the first of 1,688 exchanges between the two men. It opened, “The following from Naval Person,” and that would continue to be his salutation until he took over the government of Great Britain, when he altered it to “former Naval Person.”12

  Now that he was first lord, Churchill saw no reason to alter his daily regimen. He knew that his late hours, a consequence of his siestas, were a trial for his subordinates. But most of them were career officers; they knew the need for sacrifices in wartime. He had followed the same schedule the first ten months of the last war, and the Admiralty had adjusted to it. He had been forty then; now, at sixty-five, he found the nap an absolute necessity, permitting him, he said, “to press a day and a half’s work into one.” Mary remembers that after an hour’s rest he “awoke a giant refreshed.” If he could work sixteen or seventeen hours a day, he reasoned, they could adjust to his eccentric hours. At one time or another all those officers directly under him tried to sleep in the early afternoon. Somehow they couldn’t drift off. The only exception was the first sea lord. Pound developed a habit of sleeping while sitting bolt upright. The only difficulty was that it became involuntary. Winston would pace the private office, delivering precise, detailed instructions on a matter of considerable importance, only to discover that the Royal Navy’s senior admiral of the fleet was, and for a time had been, dead to the world.13

  Winston’s typical Admiralty day began at six or seven in the morning and continued, broken only by his rest after lunch, through a two-hour evening conference and on until two or three the next morning. Of course, this was not Chartwell; his first visitor each morning was Captain Richard Pim, RN, arriving to brief the first lord on overnight developments in the war at sea. Pim always began by describing changes in the Admiralty’s situation map. He did this slowly; Winston carried a rough map around in his head, and he needed time to switch, say, the little flag for this cruiser from here to there, or to remove—with great satisfaction—the pin representing a Nazi U-boat sunk by a British destroyer. Should Winston ever be captured by the enemy and successfully interrogated, using torture or drugs, the results would be catastrophic for the navy. Therefore, he never left Admiralty House without his pistol and a suicide pill in his pen.

  During the first week of the war, while the first lord and his lady stayed in Morpeth Mansions, the Office of Works converted the nurseries and attics on the two top floors of Admiralty House into a flat for them. Clementine decided to keep the gay chintz curtains, hung by Lady Diana Cooper during Duff Cooper’s tenure as first lord, but transformed the rest, as Lady Diana discovered when she came calling. In her diary she wrote: “O what a change… from my day!” She mourned her bed, which “rose sixteen feet from a shoal of gold dolphins and tridents; ropes made fast the blue satin curtains; round the walls Captain Cook was discovering Australia. Now all has suffered a sea change. The dolphins are stored away and on a narrow curtainless pallet bed sleeps the exhausted First Lord. My gigantic gold-and-white armoire holds his uniform. The walls are charts.”14

  First in Morpeth Terrace and then Admiralty House, Pim had to do a bit of shouting to make himself heard while Winston splashed about in his bath. The new first lord was eager to leave Morpeth Mansi
ons; he disliked sleeping so far from his maps, framed in wood and hung on the walls of Admiralty House’s elegant, 217-year-old library, which overlooked the Horse Guards Parade. This became the upper war room, a floor beneath the flat, created by Pim as directed in one of Churchill’s first wartime orders. It was soon the nerve center of the navy. The maps—covered with black cloth to hide them from unauthorized Admiralty personnel passing through—bore small pins with flags which identified the last known position of His Majesty’s warships, convoys, enemy vessels which had been spotted, and—with the help of Lloyd’s of London—all British merchantmen. Details were at the fingertips of the Prof, who occupied an office next to the war room.15

  This was in Lloyd’s interest. Submarines were not the only peril awaiting British ships which left home waters. German raiders also lurked over the horizon: enemy warships and armed steamships disguised as peaceful freighters. A British skipper spotting a tramp steamer in the South Atlantic could send the Admiralty a coded inquiry and, within minutes, receive a reply telling him whether the vessel was registered and, if so, her mission and whether she was supposed to be where she was. “If a Raider was reported in any specific area,” Pim wrote in his unpublished memoirs, “we were able in a few minutes to say what British ships were in the vicinity and what was their speed so that a wireless message could be sent ordering them, if necessary, to alter course to avoid the danger.”16

  Pim’s assignment was formidable. Thousands of merchantmen flew the red ensign, feeding and arming England, and at any given moment at least half of them were at sea. Pim recalled how, when he believed the war room was ready, he sent word to the first lord. “Very good,” said Churchill after inspecting it, “but the maps will all have to be replaced. When you know me better you will know that I only paint in pastel shades, and those strong colours under the lamps would give me and you a headache.” Churchill required Pim and his staff to check the position of all known ships and convoys every twelve hours and replot them on the maps. The plotting was determined by a stream of signals, arriving around the clock, reporting losses of shipping to enemy attacks, details of attacks by Allied warships and aircraft, tonnage sunk by both sides, and graphs of imports arriving safely in England. If any signal of importance arrived after Winston was installed in his flat over the upper war room, Pim wrote,

  a very few moments would elapse before he arrived in the War Room and was in complete possession of all the facts. I had always heard that he was an indefatigable worker and there is no other word to describe his activities. His day started with a visit in his multi-coloured dressing gown to the War Room generally soon after seven—although often it was a far earlier hour…. With the exception of about two hours’ rest each afternoon he continued hard at it with a short respite for meals until one or two o’clock next morning when he used to pay us a final visit on his way to bed.17

  The evening conference usually began at 9:00 P.M.; two hours later the first lord would start dictating speeches. (“Are you ready?” he might remark to his typist. “I’m feeling very fertile tonight.”) The Prof would arrive in the private office around midnight, settle on a sofa in front of the fire, and remain until Churchill retired. Before bed Winston would tour the operational rooms in the basement—“terribly good for the naval staff,” a private secretary recalls—and end his day with a final visit to the war room. Sir Geoffrey Shakespeare, parliamentary secretary to the Admiralty, writes that once, well after midnight, Winston asked a secretary, “Where is the OIL?” Baffled, the secretary replied, “What OIL?” Churchill said: “I want Admiral the OIL”—he meant “Earl”—“of Cork and Orrery.” Shakespeare adds: “It was nearly 3 A.M. We were dropping with fatigue.”18

  Although the King waited patiently in Buckingham Palace, ready to present the Admiralty’s seals to his new first lord, Churchill did not kiss hands until the third day after his appointment. He was far too busy. His prewar informants had kept him apprised of urgent naval issues, and as a critic of Anglo-German naval treaties, he had undertaken a detailed study of Raeder’s new Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine (navy high command). But now he had to explore the whole of his new realm, launch projects, devise strategies, propose offensive operations, assign priorities, prepare defenses for the vast arsenal of challenges Raeder—after six years of planning aggressive naval war—was hurling at the Admiralty around the clock. Moreover, he had his other War Cabinet responsibilities, and was deeply involved in plans for the expansion of the army.

  Nevertheless, if the Admiralty did not have his undivided attention, he gave it far more than any of Chamberlain’s other ministers could have done. “His energy and stamina were prodigious,” the historian Arthur Marder writes. “A stream of memoranda, virtually ultimata, issued from the Private Office covering every aspect of the war at sea and leaving the recipient in no doubt as to what the First Lord wanted.” These memoranda became irreverently known as the First Lord’s Prayers because they frequently opened with “Pray inform me…” or “Pray why has… not been done.” Captain G. R. G. Allen recalls that the “one thing that remains firmly in my mind about Winston’s arrival in the Admiralty was the immediate impact which his personality made on the staff at all levels, both service and civilian.” Allen was among those who “began to receive little notes signed ‘WSC’ from the private office demanding weekly reports of progress direct to him. If the required report was a good one… one might get a reply in red ink: ‘v.g. press on.’ It was like the stone thrown in the pond, the ripples got out in all directions, galvanising people at all levels to ‘press on’—and they did.” He adds: “The same stimulation was at once felt in the fleet.”19

  The most fundamental source of conflict between Churchill and his staff would arise from polar opposites—his instincts and their traditional discipline. In peacetime the gravest sin a captain can commit is to lose his ship. If the vessel lost is a British or American warship, a court-martial is mandatory. Naval officers know that some ships must be lost in wartime, but their early training makes them cautious strategists, shrinking from risky plans and daring maneuvers. The battle of Jutland, in 1916, wasn’t really a battle. On both sides the officers making the decisions were intent upon returning home with the fewest possible losses. Both succeeded—historians called Jutland a draw—because neither put up a real fight. If the man on the bridge believes, even on a subliminal level, that sinking is, for him, the ultimate disaster, he will remain secure in his command. He will also remain a cipher. Jellicoe and von Hipper, the commanders at Jutland, are forgotten. Nelson, Farragut, and Yamamoto will be remembered as long as fighting men go down to the sea in ships.20

  Churchill loved risks and always sought ways to carry the war to the enemy. On the evening of his second day he again gathered his senior subordinates and subtly let them know, in a deceptively offhand talk, that his grasp of the Royal Navy was profound. His predecessor, the languid Lord Stanhope, had been a Gilbert and Sullivan first lord, celebrated for his ignorance of ships, of naval strategy, even of the sea. “Tell me,” he once asked a sea lord, “what is a ‘lee’ exactly?” Winston’s very language was nautical. He casually mentioned that after the naval treaties of 1930 and 1935, which he had opposed in Parliament, he had studied the design of the new German cruisers; and, as the admirals took notes, he reeled off figures and concise analyses of gunnery, engine room pressures, and keel design which would have been the envy of a flag officer lecturing at the Royal Naval College. He told them he was studying a convoy system to protect merchant shipping and was considering the laying of a mine barrage between Scotland and Norway; that he believed twelve destroyers could be “scraped” from other theaters for the Atlantic, where the enemy’s “prime attack” could be expected, and that trawlers he had ordered reconditioned were being equipped with antisub devices, including Y-guns for firing depth charges. Since the Admiralty had assumed responsibility for the safety of merchantmen, they must faithfully follow zigzag courses to foil U-boats. Royal Navy officers would exa
mine their logs and charts when they docked, and captains who had not zigzagged as instructed would be deprived of their papers. At present the war’s big question mark was Italy. Her intentions were obscure. As long as they remained so, merchant shipping must avoid the Mediterranean by taking the long Cape route to India. But Mussolini could not drift forever. Churchill felt the Admiralty should “press” the government to bring the situation “to a head… as soon as possible.” Rising, he said that “the First Lord submits these notes to his naval colleagues for consideration, for criticism and correction.” He wanted them treated as bases for discussion, he explained, not as direct orders.21

  Admiral Sir William M. James thought Churchill displayed a “remarkable grasp of sea warfare,” and that this mastery was also evident “in the numerous minutes he wrote.” These memoranda, which would grow in fame as the war progressed, were described by one of his staff officers. “The First Lord,” he wrote, “devised special red labels with just three words printed on them: ‘ACTION THIS DAY.’ This ensured that any important document… would be dealt with at once, and the reply was expected to be on not more than ‘one sheet of paper.’ ” Winston also stressed that instructions from him were to be obeyed only if he put them in writing, immediately or immediately thereafter.22

  During his years out of office, Churchill had, of course, been preoccupied with the widening gap between the Luftwaffe and the RAF. He had anticipated the need for an expanded army, and urged that plans be made to raise and equip one. The service which had troubled him least was the navy. It was still the most powerful fleet in the world, the “senior service” in an island nation which had dominated the high seas for over three centuries. When Stanley Baldwin, slashing naval estimates, had told Parliament that Britain’s might at sea was an “expensive toy” and Churchill had rebuked him, for once in those lonely years he had heard an approving murmur of “Hear, hear” on both sides of the House. Winston had denounced the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, but its provision that the Nazi navy be permitted to build two warship tons for every seven built by Britain did not alarm the Royal Navy. Even the navies of other countries thought Admiralty hubris, though infuriating, was justified. On the first day of the new war Admiral Raeder had written that the Führer’s Kriegsmarine was “in no way” prepared “for the great struggle with Great Britain.” He thought his surface forces were “so inferior in number and strength to those of the British fleet” that they “can do no more than show that they know how to die gallantly”; and “die U-bootwaffe”—the submarine arm—was “still much too weak to have any decisive effect on the war.”23