Churchill's Hour

  ELEVEN

  The destroyer USS Greer was an ugly scourer of the seas that had been built during the last war and brought out of retirement at the start of the new one. Her role escorting convoys and running nautical errands was scarcely a glamorous one, but it should have been safe enough. After all, it wasn’t as if the United States was at war.

  On 4 September 1941 she was carrying passengers and mail to Iceland. She had reached a point south-east of Greenland when she was signalled by a British bomber that a German submarine had crash-dived some ten miles ahead. The Greer went to investigate and soon picked up the trail of the U-boat on her sound equipment. The British bomber stayed in the vicinity for about an hour until, running short of fuel, she made one final pass and dropped four depth charges at the submarine, the U-652. Then the bomber returned to its base.

  The American ship continued to track the German U-boat for another two hours. In the belief that the Greer had dropped the depth charges and was pursuing her with the intent of dropping more, the U-652 fired a torpedo. It missed by a hundred yards, but in retaliation the Greer dropped eight of her own depth charges. A second torpedo was fired, and another eleven depth charges were thrown at the German boat. By the time the engagement was finally discontinued, the USS Greer had been in contact with the German for the best part of four hours.

  It was a somewhat academic confrontation, for there had been no hits and no casualties on either side. Yet it was what Churchill had been praying for, what his life depended upon and what he had been willing to trade his soul for.

  The Germans had attacked the United States Navy.

  Amidst the sounding of alarums and the beating of many drums, President Roosevelt recalled Congress. He also announced he would make a major pronouncement about the German attack. The world held its breath.

  Churchill, of course, did not. He was ecstatic. ‘At last! It means war. By God, if I’d known that was all it would take, I’d have torpedoed the bloody ship myself!’ he declared. Roosevelt had told him that everything would be done to force an incident. Now the Germans had tumbled into the net.

  It was also reported that the first snows had begun to fall in Russia. It wouldn’t bring the German advance grinding to a halt, not yet; in fact, as Churchill told everyone within earshot, if the campaign was anything like that of Napoleon’s, the freezing conditions would at first help the Germans. ‘The Herrenvolk have found themselves getting bogged down in the muds and sloughs of autumn. Yet as the soil of Mother Russia begins to freeze, so the invader will find firmer footing, for a while. But then—then!’ he roared. ‘They will wake one grey and miserable morn to find they have thrust themselves firmly into the jaws of merciless winter!’

  But for all his confidence, the castle of dreams that Churchill had constructed proved to be built of straw. He sat listening to the presidential broadcast in Downing Street; Sawyers had set up a radio on the Cabinet table and brought in a tray of refreshments, but as he prepared to leave Churchill motioned him to remain. ‘We do not walk out on the President when he is about to declare the depths of his devotion.’ He smiled in anticipation.

  Roosevelt made his broadcast from the basement of the White House. He was wearing a black armband for the occasion—his mother had died a few days beforehand. His words were blunt.

  The attack on the USS Greer was, the President said, ‘piracy, legally and morally’. He said the German submarine had fired first. With no trace of ambivalence, he declared that the Nazis planned to create ‘a permanent world system based on force, terror and murder.’ This would be resisted, ‘no matter what it takes, no matter what it costs.’

  ‘When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike,’ the President continued, adopting the fireside manner for which he was so renowned, ‘you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him. These Nazi submarines and raiders are the rattlesnakes of the Atlantic. They are a menace to the free pathways of the high seas. They are a challenge to our sovereignty.’

  In Roosevelt’s eyes, the Germans had been not only indicted but already convicted. The palm of Churchill’s hand smacked down upon the Cabinet table in approval.

  ‘The time for active defence is now,’ the President continued.

  Churchill sniffed. Active defence? Somehow the words seemed to imply an ambiguity, a softening in the President’s tone and intensity. He was introducing shade where before he had been painting only in black and white.

  He declared that US forces would shoot first upon any German rattlesnake found in American defensive waters. They would not wait to be bitten. They would defend not only American ships but all friendly ships in these waters. And those waters, he decreed, would be stretched to cover three-quarters of the Atlantic.

  Fine words. A clear commitment. But he did not declare war. Indeed, he insisted that there would be no war: ‘There will be no shooting unless Germany continues to seek it.’

  After the President had finished speaking, Sawyers switched off the radio. Churchill remained still in his chair.

  ‘Do we break out a bottle to celebrate, like?’ the servant enquired.

  ‘To celebrate what, precisely?’

  ‘Active defence.’

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘Better than nowt, I suppose.’

  Churchill’s jowls had sunk. He looked intently at the brown tablecloth. It was some time before he replied. ‘Sawyers, my son informs me that there is a house of ill-repute in Cairo—one of many such establishments, I believe—where the proprietor has daubed upon his wall the message: “Give us the tools and we will finish the job”. You may remember the phrase.’

  ‘’Deed I do.’

  ‘It sums up perhaps what a large part of the world thinks of me. History has cast me in the role of the common tart. I smile at de Gaulle. I am nice to any number of Arabs. I am even forced to embrace the bloody Russians. I am reduced to plying my trade on every street corner. But the President is of altogether finer quality. He is like a beautiful woman who knows she is desired, who is warm, suggestive, promises to lead you to paradise, even hitches her skirts halfway up her leg in anticipation…’—Churchill ground out his cigar with considerable violence—‘then leaves you to finish the job by yourself. The President is halfway to war, and three-quarters of the way across the Atlantic, but no further. It may all be, as you so charmingly put it, “better than nowt”, but at this moment I feel a rather desperate sense of disappointment.’

  ‘Can’t you twist his arm a bit?’

  ‘You cannot woo with a whip, Sawyers,’ Churchill replied quietly. ‘So we shall continue to protest our love to the President and hope that next time his skirts will be hitched a little higher, until, before he realizes it, he has reached the point beyond which all further protestations of virtue are useless.’

  At around this time, when the focus of so much of the world centred on events in the Atlantic, the Prime Minister of Japan sought an audience with His Most Imperial Majesty, Hirohito. When he had first become Prime Minister four years earlier, Prince Fumimaro Konoye had been counted as a moderate, but experience had dealt with him harshly. His mood was sombre as he led his frock-coated cabinet and military commanders into the council chamber of the Kokyo imperial palace.

  While their god-king sat and everyone else stood, Konoye outlined his plans. The bullying and blockading of the Western powers had cast long shadows across their land, he argued, and their dreams were in danger of falling about them like the leaves of an angry autumn. To do nothing would be to submit to both personal dishonour and imperial disaster. So he proposed to the Emperor that Japan should launch a simultaneous attack against all the Western colonial powers—America, Britain and the Dutch—‘to expel the influence of these three countries from east Asia, to establish a sphere of self-defence and self-preservation of the Japanese Empire, and to build a new order in greater east Asia.’

  But in the obtuse and formalized manners that govern such audiences, it became clear that the occupant of the Chrysanthemum
Throne might not be content. His tone implied anxiety; his ministers could not promise immediate victory in such an enterprise. He would therefore understand his ministers if in their wisdom they thought it necessary to seek more time in pursuing a diplomatic solution by initiating talks with the Americans. He mentioned only the Americans. The British, it seemed, were of far less interest to the imperial mind, the Dutch of no interest at all.

  Confused by the unexpected chill in the mists that clung to the imperial mountaintop, the ministers withdrew, promising that nothing would be done to pursue their plans for at least another month.

  In London, Churchill could know nothing of this directly, but he did not need to. He saw the signs, even though he didn’t immediately comprehend the significance of them all; the increase in Japanese military signal activity; their renewed diplomatic activity in Washington; their ominous silence in London, where Shigemitsu, their ambassador, had long since been recalled and not replaced.

  Churchill was an old campaigner, with the scars of one who had fought in many wars and the instincts of a survivor. As the sun of summer cooled and another long winter beckoned, Churchill could hear the sounds of infamy on the march from halfway round the world.

  Harriman walked with hunched shoulders down the steps that led from the rear of Downing Street towards the park. He was dressed in a raincoat even though the night was neither cold nor damp. He was worn out. He had only just stepped off the plane at Heston when he’d been summoned to The Presence; he hadn’t even had a chance to wash. He was sore from the buffeting of the flight, his eyes ached from the weeks of close work, yet Churchill demanded still more. Everyone, it seemed, demanded more of him right now.

  He was also bruised from the time he’d spent with his wife. Both of them realized they had wanted to be elsewhere. She had new interests, he was sure of it, just as he had grown distracted by Pamela, but they hadn’t spoken about any of it. There were still the formalities of marriage to observe, and they were both formal people.

  As he reached the bottom of the steps at the back of Downing Street, he stumbled. After six weeks in the bright lights of Washington and New York, he’d fallen out of the practice of walking almost blind in the blackout, and there had been so much of Winston’s bloody brandy.

  Suddenly he was aware of someone nearby, trying to catch up with him. A woman, judging by the rustle and the click of her heels.

  ‘You all right, love?’ a raucous voice enquired. ‘Fancy a good time, do yer?’

  He groaned. He wasn’t in the frame of mind to enjoy being hassled, particularly by a Piccadilly warrior. He put his head down, strode forward, but she was plucking at his sleeve, slipping her arm through his.

  ‘You don’t know how lucky you are, Mr Averell Harriman. One smile at any other woman on your first evening back and I’d have left much of your anatomy dangling from the hands of Big Ben.’

  ‘Pamela!’

  And they were locked together in the darkness, panting out their greetings.

  ‘I was expecting you…back at the Dorchester.’

  ‘Couldn’t wait.’

  ‘Wonderful surprise.’

  ‘Missed, missed, missed you!’

  Then they were silent for a long time, holding each other, listening to the sounds of the night in the park. Owls, coots, the whisper of drying leaves. When at last they parted, they began walking towards the lake.

  ‘You must be tired,’ she said.

  ‘Better now I’m with you.’

  ‘Even so.’ She could sense a weariness that had burrowed through to his bones. ‘How was it back home?’

  He wasn’t sure if she meant his homeland or his wife. He chose the diplomatic path.

  ‘Chaotic. Confused. Washington crawling with quiet men who are determined on war and appeasers who would die to prevent it. The President sitting in the middle, bearing the imprint of the last opinion poll.’

  ‘You sound bitter.’

  ‘Not really. More frustrated. Roosevelt’s heart’s in the right place, but I guess in a wheelchair you learn to take things cautiously.’

  An autumn moon shimmered off the lake. Ducks chattered to each other. One of the park’s pelicans, ghost-like in the distance, stretched its wings.

  ‘Washington’s floating on a lake of poison right now. Lies, rumours, distortions. Everything we do gets twisted. The Germans are behind it, must be. There’s an organized campaign—German money—to undercut everyone who gets involved in the war.’

  ‘You, too?’

  ‘Right in the damned middle.’ He sighed, sounding old. ‘They’ve been peddling stories that I’m spending huge amounts of the Lend-Lease money on champagne and luxury hotels.’

  ‘That’s so unfair.’

  ‘And off the mark. Who the hell have I bought champagne for? Apart from you, and that was with my own money.’

  ‘I suspect I’m not the safest alibi for you to offer, either,’ she whispered, clinging to his arm.

  ‘So then they tweak the story, and claim it’s the British officials who are spending the Lend-Lease money on high living. Oh, it makes great headlines. It’s one bunch of cynical bastards we have back home.’ His tiredness was causing him to lose his normal restraint. ‘Right now I feel as if I’ve spent the last month with every rat in the business taking free shots at me. Like St Sebastian. You know—the one who died with all those arrows sticking out of him?’

  ‘Now, would that be the Sebastian who was a member of the Imperial Roman guard? The one who was persecuted for his faith?’ she enquired sweetly, mocking him gently, but he was too tired to notice.

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘But he didn’t die from the arrows.’

  ‘Truly?’

  ‘No, he was nursed back to health—by a woman. You men can be so useless on your own.’ She held him tight, trying to squeeze some warmth back into him. ‘Book of Saints. Read under the covers on cold winter nights in Dorset. Sebastian didn’t die until later, when the Emperor had him beaten to death.’

  ‘Sorry. I guess at times I underestimate you.’

  His guard was down; it was as close as he had ever come to a compliment. It would have to do.

  He sighed. ‘You know, Pam, if I were a cowboy, I’d be on my horse and riding into the sunset right now. Damn them all!’

  She snuggled into his armpit as they walked slowly beneath the trees.

  ‘I used to ride a lot when I was a young girl in Dorset,’ she said, trying to lead him away from his cares.

  ‘Yeah?’ he muttered, not listening.

  ‘Near our home there’s a huge giant that’s been cut into the chalk. A mystical place called Cerne Abbas. Our giant is very famous, more than two thousand years old. He has a huge club and…’ She laughed gently.

  ‘And what?’

  ‘A huge phallus.’

  ‘How huge?’ he asked, stopping to face her, inevitably intrigued.

  ‘When I was ten, it was almost three times my length when I lay down beside it.’

  ‘Did you, now?’

  ‘And on May Day it points directly to where the sun rises.’

  ‘Oh, it’s an astronomical instrument, then.’

  They were holding each other tightly once more. Harriman had his back against a tree. She could tell from the pressure of her body on him, and his on her, that he had begun to put aside both the war and his weariness.

  ‘You’ve been away a very long time, my love.’

  ‘Seems like for ever.’

  Her fingers had begun to edge their way down his shirtfront and behind his belt.

  ‘Pamela…’ His voice was torn between desire and discretion. ‘What if someone…’

  ‘It’s dark. And you can always plead diplomatic immunity.’

  ‘But you’re the Prime Minister’s daughter-in-law, for Heaven’s sake.’

  ‘And who would believe that,’ she whispered, as her hand began searching deep within his trousers.

  More American ships were attacked that Septem
ber. A freighter, the Steel Seafarer, was sunk by a German plane in the Red Sea the day after the Greer had been attacked, and a week later the Arkansan was damaged. No one was killed in these attacks, but then the merchantman Montana was torpedoed and sunk in the North Atlantic, and twenty-six of its crew drowned. She was flying the flag of Panama, a US protectorate, rather than the Stars and Stripes itself. A few days later the Pink Star, laden with food and heading for Iceland, was torpedoed, leaving thirteen dead, and a week after that the oil tanker I. C. White en route to South Africa was lost along with three of its crew. But, like the Montana, they were both flying the Panamanian flag, and they were merchantmen. It seemed to make a difference. Still the United States would not go to war.

  There was too much confusion. Too many Americans who wanted Communist Russia to lose. Too many who thought Britain couldn’t win. Too many with burning memories of the last war, when American sons had died to save Europe—and what a waste of sons that had been. And too many who believed Roosevelt when he had promised again and again and again that their sons were not going to be sent to die in another foreign war.

  The clash between the Greer and the U-boat had been a game of no hits, no strikes, no runs, while the tangles with the other boats were no more than the inevitable fallout from someone else’s war.

  And that’s the way the majority of Americans wanted it to stay. Someone else’s war.

  ‘The leaves are turning, Winston. Time for birds like me to fly.’

  Churchill cast an eye at the beeches. ‘They will be magnificent while they last, Max.’

  It was still stiflingly hot for the time of year. There had been croquet on the lawn for Clementine and other members of the family, followed by afternoon tea served with much laughter at the antics of Mary’s new dog, with everything accompanied by the scraping tones of the gramophone, but the old man hadn’t been part of it. He had sought the shelter of the woods, and Beaverbrook, his old friend, had dragged behind him.

  ‘Sarah seems out of sorts,’ the Canadian said.