Monday - August 24, 2009

How Churchill was bullied into D-Day - Excerpt, one of several chapters.

I haven’t been posting all the other chapters but thought it interesting to post this and let you all know that at the link, you will find all the other chapters that have been published so far.  For those interested in history, this is all quite fascinating.

I’ve long had a problem btw, with the Brit thinking that was so prevalent at the time, that the US should have entered the war sooner.
Why?  America had some problems of its own at the time.  If we were inward thinking, there was damn good reason for it.  Most Americans really just wanted to get on with their own lives and leave Europe alone to fight its own wars.  The general population I much doubt could see the threat Nazi Germany presented. We knew they were the bad guys but things were so remote in those days, you can’t blame them. Well, you can but I don’t.
There seemed to be a greater threat from Communism, if anything.  Many ppl didn’t even have electricity or a phone in their home in some parts of the country.  It may be hard for some to imagine, but I have one dear friend in TN. who is old enough to remember no indoor plumbing or telephone and only a battery operated radio and no electric.  That may not have been typical of most of America but it sure as heck was the norm for many.
We had no reason to join in a European war in ‘39 or ‘40.

If I have a problem with the attitude on that subject, I also have a serious problem with FDRs attitude with regard to the Empire.
I don’t see why it should have concerned him nor do I think it was any of his business.  Whatever the perceived evils of empire there are, not to say there were none, without the influence and civil service and education, the justice system (such as it was, not perfect but ...) bridges, water systems etc.  The Brits raised the standard of living for many millions and even if it was in their own best interest, the fact still remains that in the end, people were better off with the Brits then they were before. And many millions were surely better off under Brit rule then French, Belgium or German.

I didn’t mean to launch a defense of 19th century empire. Only saying that I understand it and that it wasn’t any of FDRs business.  Especially in light of the fact that in a sense, we (America) had one too.  And when it came to minorities, our outlook was none too kind either.

Next month sees the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II in 1939. It was a conflict that Britain could not have won without one man - Winston Churchill.
To mark the occasion the Mail is publishing a major two-week series by Max Hastings.
Last week Britain’s greatest war historian daily revealed and illuminated the extraordinary man behind the myth - his strengths ... and his weaknesses.
Today, in part seven, he reveals that Churchill was left humiliated by the behind-the-scenes political manoeuvrings that led to D-Day ...

MAX HASTINGS: How Churchill was bullied into D-Day - his most triumphant achievement - by the Americans

By Max Hastings
Last updated at 2:20 PM on 24th August 2009

The spring of 1944 found Churchill, in public at least, in typically rousing mood. ‘The Germans will suffer very heavy casualties when our band of brothers gets among them,’ he wrote to United States President Franklin Roosevelt, quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V.

He was referring to their quickly advancing plans for Operation Overlord, the long-awaited Allied assault on the beaches of enemy-occupied France.

But, privately, he was deeply unhappy about the entire project and not best pleased that, as he saw it, he was being railroaded into it by the Americans.

Ever since the U.S. entered the war, he had been under pressure to invade France, to launch the much-vaunted Second Front and ease the pressure on the Soviet forces fighting Hitler on the other side of Europe.

The Americans seemed oblivious to the scale of the task, and, to the man in the street there, it looked as if the British and their ‘fat-headed PM’ - as one New Yorker put it - were plain yellow, ducking the fight.

It was galling but he was no longer vital to victory

One of Churchill’s great achievements was to resist for two years the demands for what he rightly considered would be a premature - and catastrophic - assault on the continental mainland, fiercely contested and possibly ending in a humiliating bloodbath.

His task was made harder by the clamour from the British public for him to act. Even his friends turned on him.

Despite being one of Churchill’s closest cronies and a former minister in his government, the maverick press baron Lord Beaverbrook launched a ‘Second Front now!’ campaign in his newspapers.

Churchill deflected U.S. pressure by persuading Roosevelt - over the heads of the U.S. generals - that the best way to start the fight-back against the Nazis was with U.S. landings in North Africa.

Then, after throwing the Germans out of North Africa, the joint Allied armies would make their way across the Mediterranean to Sicily and Italy, entering Europe through the back door, as Churchill had always intended.

In this, his strategic judgment proved superior to the Americans. France in 1943 would have been a much harder nut to crack. The British Prime Minister had been proved right - so far.

But the suspicious American generals, while committing their troops to the Mediterranean theatre, had never given up on their preferred strategy of a landing in northern France.

In summit meetings with Roosevelt, Churchill found himself signing up to the idea while believing that in the end he could make sure it never happened.

But the uncomfortable reality was that he was no longer in charge of events. He had been Britain’s deliverer back in 1940 and 1941 - but by the end of 1943 he was not vital to victory. Much as it galled many Britons, it was America who was now in the driving seat.

For all Churchill’s vaunting of the special relationship between Britain and America, it was a partnership beset by disagreements that were as much philosophical as military.

The key to understanding it is to strip aside the rhetoric of the two leaders and acknowledge that it rested, as relations between states always do, upon perceptions of national interest.

As for the individual personalities involved, there was some genuine sentiment on Churchill’s side, but none on Roosevelt’s.

The U.S. President had always viewed himself as the senior partner. He paid scant attention to British claims that for years before the U.S. joined the war Britain had played the nobler part, pouring forth blood and enduring bombardment in a lone struggle for freedom.

He paid only lip service to the collective gratitude owed by the democracies to Britain for single-handedly standing up to Hitler.

Churchill liked to assert that, far from owing a huge cash debt to the U.S. when the war was over, Britain should be recognised as a creditor for its lone defence of freedom in 1940-41. This was never plausible.

Polls showed that most Americans - 70 per cent - were implacable in their belief that at the end of the war the British should repay the billions they had received from the U.S. in Lend-Lease supplies. They stuck to the notion that Britain was a wealthy nation. They failed to grasp the extent of her financial exhaustion.

In fact, Roosevelt felt scant sympathy for his transatlantic ally. He had visited Britain several times as a young man, but never revealed much liking for the country.

He perceived hypocrisy in its pretensions as a bastion of democracy and freedom while it sustained a huge empire of subject peoples in Africa and Asia and denied them democratic representation.

Americans were overwhelmingly hostile to Britain for refusing to countenance self-government for India.

‘You’re the top/You’re Mahatma Gandhi!’ wrote Cole Porter euphorically, reflecting the huge enthusiasm of his countrymen for the guru of the Indian independence movement.

Such sentiment was wormwood to Churchill. At the best of times he had little patience with the Indian people, his view unchanged since he served among them as a cavalry subaltern in the 1890s.

He opposed, for instance, granting Indian officers disciplinary powers over British other ranks. He expostulated against ‘the humiliation of being ordered about by a brown man’.

He was disgusted by the holier-than-thou attitude of Americans on the matter. He
deemed it rank cant for a nation that had itself colonised a continent, dispossessing and largely exterminating its indigenous population, and which still practised racial segregation, to harangue others about the treatment of native peoples.

But Roosevelt’s belief was that the day of empire was done. He co-operated with Churchill’s nation in order to defeat Hitler. Thereafter, he proposed to reshape the world in accordance with American concepts of morality.

Despite his acquaintance with foreign parts having been confined to gilded European holidays with his millionaire father, he had a boundless appetite to alter the world. He regarded the future without fear.

Churchill, by contrast, was full of apprehension about the threats a new world posed to Britain’s greatness. It was from these two very different perspectives that the Allies continued uneasily to conduct their joint affairs.

For his part, Churchill continued to duck and weave, sustaining the fiction that an Overlord operation in the spring of 1944 was an option rather than an absolute commitment. He pressed for the thrust up through Italy to remain as the Allies’ immediate priority

They should seize the moment in the Mediterranean, he argued to Roosevelt, rather than stake everything on a highly dangerous and speculative cross-Channel attack.

But Churchill was wrong about this. Italy was a difficult battlefield, easy to defend, difficult to advance in. If efforts had been concentrated there, D-Day would have been delayed until 1945.

It was American resolution alone that ensured the operational timetable for D-Day was maintained, while the Prime Minister expended political capital in a struggle with Washington that he was not only bound to lose, but which he deserved to lose.

HERE FOR THE REST OF THIS CHAPTER

The link above will also give you all the other chapters in the book published on line so far. They will continue all week.

More from Max Hastings…

* MAX HASTINGS: Churchill’s hunger to take the fight to Hitler made him send thousands of heroes to needless death 21/08/09
* MAX HASTINGS: After a series of military defeats even Churchill started to fear that our Army was simply too yellow to fight 21/08/09
* MAX HASTINGS: Privately Churchill called them ‘bloody Yankees’ - but with a lover’s ardour he fawned, flattered and flirted to woo the U.S. 19/08/09
* MAX HASTINGS: Only one man instinctively knew what battered Britain needed to lift spirits 19/08/09
* MAX HASTINGS: Churchill was brutally rude, capricious and petulant. Even his wife feared he was being corrupted by power 18/08/09
* MAX HASTINGS: A gloriously flawed hero: How Winston Churchill saved this nation from the brink of extinction 16/08/09
* MAX HASTINGS: Churchill, the flawed giant who saved our nation - and our world 14/08/09

Posted by peiper     on 08/24/2009 at 08:24 AM   
Filed Under: • History • UK • War-Stories •  
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