 : At the White House 241  World War Part :   december – august 2 4 2 churchill’s war Contents 13: At the White House .................................................... 243 14: Some Chicken .......................................................... 267 15: The Completest Intimacy ............................................. 291 16: Poor Winston.............................................................315 17: Churchill Up and Churchill Down................................. 337 18: Humiliation Valley .................................................... 363 19: Three Men and a Baby................................................ 397 20: Molotov and the Mongolian Smile ................................. 421 21: One Thousand Bombers............................................... 437 22: The Blame for Tobruk ................................................. 465 23: The Knight’s Move..................................................... 483  : At the White House 243 : At the White House T he tide had begun to turn before Japan’s fearsome plunge into the war. In North Africa, General Auchinleck’s forces had raised Rommel’s siege of Tobruk; a German retreat was beginning both there and at Moscow, where the pitiless Russian winter had fallen with unequal cruelty upon the opposing armies. At sea too the war of the Atlan- fi tic supply line had eased. More ships were arriving, and the rst convoys of war goods had reached North Russia without loss. Only the British public, an amorphous, half-blind animal that has not always been proven wrong in its instincts, seemed perplexed by Pearl Harbor – ‘rather breathless,’ as a secret study found, ‘with confused reactions.’ Contempt for the Japanese gave way to dismay at their strength, which the ‘idiotic press’ had under- rated. There was however satisfaction that America was now in the war. The prime minister shared that satisfaction. No matter whether Roosevelt declared war on Germany or not, the P.M. knew enough from the Black Jumbos to recognise that Hitler was both honour- and treaty-bound to de- clare war on Japan’s enemies. (A rush magic received from Bletchley Park fi the next day, the eighth, con rmed it. The top item in the secret box that evening was a white teleprinter message from the air ministry, an intercept of a ‘most immediate’ cypher message sent earlier that day by General Oshima to Tokyo. Having received the radio report that hostilities had bro- ken out between Japan and America, he had at once called on Ribbentrop; the latter said that although he had not yet secured Hitler’s sanction, ‘the immediate participation in the war by Germany and Italy was a matter of course’ in consequence, and in front of Oshima he had at once telephoned the Italian foreign minister Count Ciano. Churchill ticked this in red ink). Churchill had spent the last hours at Chequers that Sunday night rush- ing out messages to sundry leaders, with ambassadors Harriman and Winant  2 4 4 churchill’s war assisting. He dictated words of encouragement to Chiang Kai-shek, of emo- tion to Harry Hopkins, of allure to Eamon de Valera: ‘Now is your chance,’ he cajoled the Irish leader. ‘Now or never! A nation once again! I will meet you wherever you wish!’ (Churchill had secretly offered the six counties of Northern Ireland to Eire as a reward for joining his war). Ambassador Winant, at his request, repeated this very private message to Roosevelt, adding that it was for Washington to decide when Britain should actually declare war on Japan. Winant left Chequers at midnight- thirty. He cabled to his president: ‘The prime minister is calling Parliament to meet at three o’clock this afternoon.’ Should the P.M. ask for a declara- tion of war at that time or simply say that he would ask for a declaration within an hour after the Americans declared war, ‘which he has pledged to ff do’? Drawing attention to the awkward transatlantic di erence in time, Winant suggested that the president might want to address the Joint Ses- sion of the U.S. Congress prior to a British declaration of war. Roosevelt too did not care for any appearance of being dragged in by the British: ‘I think it best on account of psychology here,’ he replied, ‘that   Britain’s declaration of war be withheld until after my speech at : Wash- ington time.’ He added, ‘Delighted to know of message to De Valera.’  By two a.m. – it was now Monday, December – Churchill had re- ceived word from Tokyo that Japan had formally declared war on both Britain and the United States. He sent word up to Invergordon, directing Eden to call him back as soon as he arrived there, and went to bed. fi At that moment in Hawaii, res were ravaging the naval base and dock- fl yards at Pearl and the hulks of those American battleships still a oat. Nearly three thousand servicemen had died. Unaware of these horrors, Churchill could think only of his joy that the British empire’s isolation was at an end. Silly people might cavil at the vacuous Americans, might mock at their distant blather, at their vulgar ostentation and their softness and their wealth. fl That night, he was conscious of the maternal American blood owing in his veins. They had won after all. He cared no longer how many years the war might last. Britain and her peoples would emerge, mauled perhaps and mutilated, but victorious. Light-headed with sensations such as these, he allowed his valet to undress him, and pulled the bed sheets over his head. His thoughts were upon President Roosevelt as he awoke. How useful it would now be that Eden and Cadogan were in Moscow, at Stalin’s table, while he, the prime minister, was in Washington: they could conduct a glo- bal three-power conference in cypher to settle all their problems. The most  : At the White House 245 urgent would be to ensure that Roosevelt, now that he was in the war, fi applied his country’s resources to defeating Germany rst. washington, still favouring the British government with little frankness, admitted during the night that they had lost two battleships at Hawaii, and that this left the Pacific Fleet with six effective battleships. Such losses seemed eminently tolerable: such are the fortunes of war. Winston’s mind was set on Washington. With fond, fleeting memories of his Atlantic meet- ing lapping around his memory, he was driven out of the Chequers estate and returned to Downing-street. It had been a most memorable weekend.   The cabinet, meeting at : , accepted his suggestion that he visit Wash- ington forthwith, and he put it to His Majesty, without whose permission he could not leave the kingdom. ‘The whole plan of Anglo-American de- fence and attack has to be concerted in the light of reality,’ he wrote, justifying the journey. ‘We also have to be careful that our share of munitions and ff other aid which we are receiving from the United States does not su er more than is, I fear, inevitable.’ That afternoon he addressed the Commons, with his shoulders bowed, and his features wearing the well-practised expression of grim piety. Fit- ting the mood of the House, he made his speech matter-of-fact, almost ff dull; it was poorly constructed, and indi erently delivered. He inspired fi hope only when he reassured the Members: ‘Some of the nest ships in the Royal Navy have reached their stations in the Far East at a very convenient moment. Every preparation in our power has been made and I do not doubt that we shall give a good account of ourselves.’ Aboard the battleship that was to bear him to Murmansk, Eden had fi been taken sick – struck down perhaps more with morti cation than by any more conventional virus. fi At ve o’clock Sir Alexander Cadogan again ’phoned Downing-street from Scotland, to protest about the trip to Washington. Churchill told him that the cabinet had now agreed to it. Cadogan, the permanent head of the F.O., pointed out that both the P.M. and his heir-apparent would thus be out of the country. ‘That’s all right,’ rejoined Churchill. ‘That’ll work very well. Anthony will be just where I want him, and I can communicate with him in Moscow!’ Shortly, a message arrived from Roosevelt, reporting that both Houses of Congress had voted to declare war on Japan. ‘Today,’ F.D.R. told the P.M., grimly clinging to his earlier metaphor, ‘All of us are in the same boat 2 4 6 churchill’s war with you and the people and the empire, and it is a ship which will not and cannot be sunk.’ The prime minister broadcast on the B.B.C. at nine p.m. Like the M.P.s earlier that day, the radio listeners were also disappointed. At least one gained the impression that he was ‘dead tired and not quite sober.’  truly the peoples were in the hands of their popular dictators. While Churchill had been told of the loss of only two battleships at Pearl Harbor,    the American public learned of only one. At : p.m. on December , Churchill’s delegation in Washington reported to the admiralty however that the U.S. navy’s Admiral Stark was privately calling it ‘a major disaster’ fi which ‘was much more serious than thought yesterday’ –the Paci c Fleet ff was e ectively down to only two battleships. Three had in fact been sunk, and three more seriously damaged. Stark, no friend of Britain, now planned to transfer substantial forces to the Pacific. Admiral Ghormley in London disclosed that Stark had ordered the Yorktown carrier battle group to pre- fi pare to transfer from Norfolk, Virginia, to the Paci c Fleet; and that he had authorised the U.S. commander-in-chief Atlantic to withdraw all capital ships and carriers from Iceland if he desired. This seriously threatened the naval balance of power. Britain now had twelve operational battleships, the United States only eight; against these Japan and Germany could already fl set nineteen, and the French eet of Strasbourg, Provence, Jean-Bart, Richelieu and Dunkerque might one day also come under Axis control.  On December Churchill realised, after consulting various sources, that the American battleship losses were far worse than Washington had admitted – that only one, or at best two, of the eight had survived. Half of fi the U.S. air force in the Paci c had also been destroyed. The Japanese were now lords of that ocean: ‘The American public,’ Halifax concluded in his secret diary, ‘has not tumbled to this yet.’ Attending Buckingham Palace for his regular Tuesday luncheon with His Majesty, Churchill passed on the doleful truth. ‘The prime minister came to lunch,’ the king wrote, record-   ing the dreadful news: ‘In Pearl Harbor U.S. Battleships were sunk & seriously damaged ...which means that the U.S.A. has already lost com- fi mand of the sea in the Paci c.’ This created a very alarming situation for his own Prince of Wales and Repulse. Even though unaware of the ‘BJs,’ the king fl was incredulous that the U.S. eet had remained in harbour when Japan was already on a war footing. ‘W[inston],’ he concluded, ‘told me he is anxious to go to Washington to arrange various matters with F.D.R.’  : At the White House 247 A powerful wanderlust, coupled with a desire to hobnob again at the highest levels, had seized the prime minister. Eden tried again to dissuade him, but failed. ‘I still rather wish,’ he wired to the P.M., ‘that you could postpone a fortnight till my return.’ Eden was out of sight however, and out of Churchill’s mind. ‘Now that we are, as you say, “in the same boat,”’ he telegraphed to Roosevelt, ‘would it not be wise for us to have another conference?’ He proposed to arrive by warship at Baltimore or Annapolis, the closest ports to Washington, bring- ing Beaverbrook, Pound, Portal, and Dill with him. It is plain from Roosevelt’s presidential papers that he did not warm to the idea. For over a year he had swooned in ill-concealed envy of Winston’s rising star. The famous cherubic features were on every newspaper’s front page. Now that his, Roosevelt’s, hour had struck, he did not want this im- portunate Englishman strutting onto his stage: not yet. He too now tried to persuade Winston to postpone the trip. In fact he asked Lord Halifax to notify the P.M. that for security reasons he did not like the idea of Washing- ton as the location either. He proposed Bermuda instead, and not before January . Churchill however was determined. They had to meet.  at ten that evening, December , Churchill welcomed a dozen of his ad- miralty and other colleagues in the underground Cabinet War Rooms to survey the changed position. They discussed how to redress the balance of fi naval power in the Paci c. The Japanese threat to Australia and New Zea- land could no longer be ignored. How best to use Britain’s only capital ships in the region, Prince of Wales and Repulse? Churchill suggested they fi join the remnants of the U.S. Paci c Fleet at Hawaii, a gesture of both fi ff symbolic and military signi cance, and prepare to take o ensive action against Japan itself. Alternatively, the admiralty might consider a plan to employ Prince of Wales, Repulse, and Centurion as what he called ‘rogue elephants.’ Meanwhile Churchill would inform Eden that ‘in view of the changed cir- cumstances’ Russia would no longer get the ten R.A.F. squadrons on offer. He sent the bleak telegram to Eden, now ploughing into the long Arctic night toward North Russia, at once. It told him much of what had hap- fi pened – that since Roosevelt now had only two battleships left in the Paci c against ten Japanese, he was recalling all battleships from the Atlantic; that ‘according to American sources’ (evidently Winston’s euphemism for the BJs) ‘we are going to be heavily attacked in Malaya and throughout [the] Far East;’ that he intended to reinforce Malaya with aircraft from the Middle 2 4 8 churchill’s war East where, Auchinleck assured him, the tide had now turned; and that ff Eden should not now o er the ten R.A.F. squadrons to Stalin. ‘Hope you are better,’ he continued. ‘We are having a jolly time here.’ after the Pearl Harbor disaster American signals Intelligence belatedly ff got o its high horse; in a long talk with Captain Hastings, ‘C’s’ liaison ffi fi o cer in Washington, Admiral Noyes professed himself satis ed with what the British codebreakers were sending him. Churchill however suspected that Roosevelt was concealing from him the true scale of the débâcle. Even on the twelfth Admiral Ghormley supplied an account that spoke only of two battleships sunk and ‘several’ more as well as three light cruisers dam- aged; since the message also lamented three thousand ‘casualties’ there were grounds not to believe what Washington was saying. A month later, Admiral Conrad Helfrich, commander-in-chief of the Dutch navy, would express fi disquiet at the Americans’ furtiveness: ‘Why not let their ghting allies know their exact losses – which the enemy already know?’ If, he said, seven fi  out of eight battleships of the Paci c Fleet and aircraft had in fact been knocked out at Pearl Harbor ‘why try to keep it a secret from the British and the Dutch?’ Seven out of eight? ‘Surely this is untrue,’ an anguished Churchill de- manded of the First Sea Lord. ‘What have you been told? I have not pressed for information but I could certainly do so.’ Pound replied that the U.S. navy department had agreed to release the real facts, and that the damage was ‘considerably more’ than Colonel Knox, their secretary of the navy, had given out to the press.  admiral tom Phillips had sailed from Singapore with Prince of Wales and  Repulse and four destroyers on the evening of December , intending to ff maul Japanese invasion convoys o Songkhla or in the Gulf of Thailand. fi Early on the ninth he was advised that no ghter cover could be provided as fi the Japanese had destroyed all air elds in northern Malaya. While he had scanty Intelligence data on the Japanese warship movements, he had none fi on their air forces. The codebreakers at Singapore had identi ed an aircraft- carrier squadron in the Saigon area, but he pressed on, believing he had the advantage of surprise. After enemy planes sighted his force Phillips turned fl back brie y toward Singapore; at midnight he received a signal reporting  that the Japanese were also landing at the port of Kuantan, miles north of Singapore. Tragically, the signal turned out to be incorrect; although  : At the White House 249 [Facsimile of a magic intercept] 2 5 0 churchill’s war Churchill had also spoken to the king about Japanese troop landings at Kuantan, there were none. Phillips had however already changed course to intercept. Seven thousand miles away in London, Churchill had retired for the night after the meeting in the underground Cabinet War Rooms.  Awakening the next morning, December , he worked on his boxes of papers until interrupted by a ’phone call from Admiral Pound. A signal had come in from the Eastern Fleet an hour earlier, he said, reading ‘Most Im- mediate. H.M.S. Prince of Wales and H.M.S. Repulse sunk by torpedoes at  about ,’ and giving the position. Japanese shore-based torpedo planes   had sunk Repulse at : p.m.; Prince of Wales, her steering crippled like Bismarck’s by one torpedo, had foundered, plunging Admiral Phillips and  of his sailors to the deep, forty-seven minutes later. A further signal made plain that it would be impossible to keep this grim news secret for long. Churchill was dazed by the awful news. Even to himself, he probably never admitted his own rôle in forcing through the plan to send these ships fl down to Singapore without a balanced supporting eet. He certainly kept quiet about it later, when writing his memoirs. ‘K.B.O.,’ he once more ff apostrophised to his sta : ‘Keep buggering on.’ R If one item in this increasingly senseless war heralded the end of Brit- ain’s Asian empire it was this naval disaster. The fall of Singapore, the loss of Malaya, and the rise of the nationalist sentiment that was to sweep the Brit- ish out of all their possessions in the Far East over the next decade could not have followed in such swift train but for the loss of these two ships, which Churchill coldly ascribed to ‘chance.’ A telegram arrived on his desk from King George VI, touring the Welsh war industries. The news had shocked him too: ‘For all of us,’ he wrote, ‘it is a national disaster, & I fear will create consternation in Australia. The lack of details makes the fact harder to bear, coming as it does on top of yesterday’s bad news re the U.S. battleships [at Hawaii]. I thought I was getting immune to hearing bad news,’ the monarch concluded pointedly. Resolving anew to leave these questioning climes for Washington as soon as possible, Churchill hurried over to the House and made a clean breast of the warships’ loss. ‘No details are yet available,’ he added, ‘except those