Avoidable Errors Sir Winston Churchill's preeminent biographer intervenes against the anti-Churchill tide
Gilbert, Martin
Avoidable Errors Sir Winston Churchill's preeminent biographer intervenes against the anti-Churchill tide. An examination of Conrad Black's Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of...
...In the Second World War, those "difficulties" with which Roosevelt had to grapple were dominated at times by Churchill's own many demands, made necessary by British weakness and German strength...
...Despite the many allegations, speculations, and mockery in this book about Churchill's follies, or alleged follies, a strong portrait of Churchill does emerge between the pages...
...Black introduces him into the narrative when he was killed in an air crash on his way to the Churchill-Roosevelt meeting off Newfoundland in 1941...
...In this message, Roosevelt explained to Churchill that the United States would not be able to have sufficient troops in the United Kingdom for a cross-Channel landing until the very end of 1943...
...That was clearly in the American national interest, although that was no comfort to the Poles had they known of it (it was kept secret for several decades...
...The next Jewish request, within days was for protective documents for the 100,000 Jew: who had thus been spared the gas chambers...
...It then emerged that, without Roosevelt informing Churchill, the United States had already secured the entire output of the Canadian uranium mines, and heavy water production, for the following two years...
...Five months after Roosevelt's inauguration, Churchill wrote to one of Roosevelt's team: "I am very glad to hear that you have been called to Washington to take part in the tremendous and noble effort your President is making to set North America to work again...
...Sir Martin Gilbert is at present working on a book, Churchill and America, to be published by the Free Press...
...Black is right t( doubt McCloy's late-in-the-day assertion that hi took the request to Roosevelt...
...Having failed in my "tutorial" task, which I would have undertaken with pleasure, it is thus with embarrassment that I venture a few points...
...More than 5,00( French and Belgian civilians were killed...
...At the start of Roosevelt's presidency, Churchill gave an enthusiastic welcome for the New Deal...
...LACK'S ACCOUNT of the story of Roosevelt, Churchill, am the Jewish appeal to boml Auschwitz in the summer of 194, is not quite right...
...Churchill had already drafted a long appeal to Roosevelt...
...One important D-Day issue between Churchill and Roosevelt I could not find in these pages, although it was the only direct intervention by Roosevelt to overrule Churchill as the landings drew near...
...He makes no ref erence to the fact that, as soon a: the truth about the camp becalm known, for the first time, as a resul of the information transmitted t( the West in the early summer o 1944 by four Jewish escapees, the request to bomb Auschwitz am the railway lines leading to it wa made in the hope of saving Hungarian Jewry, then being deported to Auschwitz and mur dered with unprecedented rapidi ty...
...Tell him this must be the currency of the future...
...This is one of the most misquoted public remarks of the British war leader...
...So too, as elaborated by Black, does Roosevelt's public call after Hitler's occupation of Prague in the spring of 1939, for an end to German territorial expansion...
...would not be able to have sufficient troops in the U.K...
...Black makes no mention of Churchill's published article, "Roosevelt from Afar," which was widely circulated in the United States in 1934, in which Churchill wrote: "Although the policies of President Roosevelt are conceived in many respects from a narrow veil of American self-interest, the courage, the power and the scale of his efforts must enlist the ardent sympathy of every country, and his success could not fail to lift the whole world forward into the sunlight of an easier and more genial age...
...Roosevelt telephoned with regard to the possible German submarine sinking of a United States ocean liner making its way across the Atlantic...
...Most importantly, it was Arthur Purvis who, having returned to Britain at the height of the Blitz, advised Churchill, in the desperate days of November-December 1940, on how "to dramatize" Britain's vital requirements of the United States...
...Then turning to a secretary, Churchill asked for a piece of paper, on which he drew the insignia of a pound sign and a dollar sign intertwined...
...One would have thought that Black, the consummate newspaperman, would have seen the importance of such a strong newsprint endorsement of the New Deal...
...C HURCHILL'S SUGGESTION of a last-minute method of deterring Japan from making war is not mentioned here...
...This took place on October 5, 1939, scarcely a month after Churchill entered Chamberlain's War Cabinet, while Churchill was dining at his pied-a-terre in London...
...Churchill's suppor for action was made on July 7. Two days later—as : result of an entirely unrelated American bombing raid on Budapest—the Hungarian deportation: were halted...
...I did not realize that he wanted me to look at an early version of his own book, and, being much on my travels at that time, I declined...
...The reality was that Roosevelt had earlier come to an agreement with Stalin (kept secret from Churchill) to allow American warplanes to refuel at Soviet bases in the Far East on their way to bombing Japan...
...In Washington the request almost certainly never reached Roosevelt, but was deal with by John J. McCloy, Under Secretary for War who three times instructed his senior subordinate to "kill it"—that is, to do nothing...
...Had Black got the Churchill quotation right, he might have felt more able to explain Roosevelt's refusal, in August 1944, to join Churchill in pressing Stalin to allow Allied help to the Polish insurgents inside Warsaw...
...MARTIN GILBERT Another gap from the pre-war period of Roosevelt's presidency is the very first radio broadcast that Churchill made to the United States, in 1934, in which he told the American people that although he did not say that Roosevelt was "right in all his experiments," nevertheless "one does admire the spirit in which he grapples with difficulties, especially in contrast with the timidity and wooliness and the mental imprecision which we see in some other places...
...The President's high purpose and great station will enable him to rise superior to these...
...In a reversal of his usually stern—and often mocking—criticism of Churchill's various strategic 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 plans, Black stresses at one point in his narrative that Churchill was "quintessentially a man of principle," as well as "above all, and almost all the time, a fearless if sometimes self-indulgent man of integrity...
...This was when Eisenhower, having ordered the bombing of railway marshaling yards in France, received a strong protest from Churchill that the French civilian death toll was too high...
...This was a strong endorsement of Roosevelt's vision...
...In the Oval Office, Leon saw the drawing of the "Pound-Dollar" intertwined that Churchill had sent the President four years earlier...
...They will get over that...
...This is not mentioned by Black...
...As the Normandy planning went ahead according to the long-established timetable, Churchill "hardened" on it—Churchill's word—and drove it forward...
...Also missing in these pages is Churchill's positive response, at the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, to the suggestion raised in America for the creation of the post of a Minister for coordinating munitions production throughout the United States, as part of a deterrent front against potential German aggression...
...There is no clue in these pages that Purvis, the head of the British Purchasing Commission in Washington, had been a key figure after May1940 in securing Roosevelt's support for a wide variety of British material needs, including aircraft...
...As the Prime Minister explained to the President, in arguing his case: "Our immediate facilities for helping the victims of Hitler's anti-Jewish drive are so limited at present that the opening of the small camp proposed for the purpose of removing some of them to safety seems all the more incumbent upon us...
...The American democracy is likewise subjected to ridicule...
...The reverse is true...
...Churchill wanted Roosevelt to issue this warning "at the moment which you judge right, which may be very near...
...JUNE 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 19 AVOIDABLE ERRORS of Roosevelt, advised sending the President a complete "balance sheet" of British needs, rather than the hitherto piecemeal approach...
...Because Black eschews chronology at this point in his narrative, it is not made clear what was achieved during those eleven days between heart attack and belated recuperation, including the crucial meeting at which Roosevelt and Churchill presided jointly, on January 2, 1942, to work out the scale of United States war production for the coming two years, with substantial increases for both years (70 percent for 1942), an essential prelude without which the Normandy landings would have been impossible before 1945, even though Churchill still hoped to launch such a landing in 1943...
...Black quotes Churchill as saying that the policy of the Soviet Union was "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma...
...As Churchill went on to say: "but there is a key, and that key is Soviet national interest...
...The letter was delivered as Purvis advised, and was clearly a decisive one with regard to the emergence of what Churchill called "the most unsordid act in the history of any nation"—Lend Lease...
...Black makes no reference to this communication...
...While writing about Churchill's first days as Prime Minister, Black notes how the Prime Minister, "even in adversity, wrote with a clarity and determination that could not fail to impress an American president who had had only the shilly-shallyings of MacDonald, Baldwin, and Chamberlain"—Churchill's three predecessors...
...Hen Black fails to tell us that it was Roosevelt's own Wa: Refugee Board—set up by the President six month: earlier to help Jews—that dispatched Raou Wallenberg to Budapest, financed his operation and enabled him to carry out his own remarkabh Roosevelt explained to Churchill that the U.S...
...In order to do so, he approached the Canadian government for the necessary supplies of uranium and heavy water...
...There is no mention of the first telephone call Roosevelt put through to Churchill...
...As Roosevelt pondered, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor...
...That request was made to botl Churchill and Roosevelt by Jewisl leaders in the West...
...Hitler denounced Roosevelt's call in a two-hour speech to the Reichstag...
...Handing this to James Roosevelt, Churchill said to him: "Pray, bear this to your father from me...
...When the same bombing request reache( Churchill, the Prime Minister urged immedian action, instructing his Foreign Minister: "Get any thing out of the air force you can, and invoke me i necessary...
...S WE APPROACH THE SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the Normandy landings, it is strange to read lack's assertion of Churchill's "reluctance to return in force to the beaches from which his MARTIN GILBERT army had been evacuated in 1940...
...These troops would then need several months intensive training before the assault...
...How right Churchill was...
...No one who finishes it from cover to cover can fail to come away without a strong 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 MARTIN GILBERT impression of one of the giants of the 20th century Black finely conveys the complex, compelling character, abilities, stature, and achievements of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose life and career spanned more than three decades of American and world history IN THE LAST FIVE TUMULTUOUS YEARS of his life, Roosevelt was in almost daily contact with Britain's war leader, Winston Churchill...
...There is nothing that we could not do if we were together...
...In his account, Black adds that the Royal Air Force was "acting on Soviet Intelligence claims...
...In fact, it was not an initiative by Churchill at all, but the positive response, by Churchill's deputy, the Labour Party leader Clement Attlee (in Churchill's absence on his way to the Yalta Conference), to an urgent Soviet request for a bombing raid to prevent German reinforcements reaching the Eastern Front...
...This took place not at Palm Beach, as recounted by Black, but thirty miles further south, at Pompano Beach...
...Puzzlingly, there is no mention in these pages of one of the most serious (and for Churchill, humiliating) wartime disputes between the two leaders...
...In a powerful passage, Black describes how the British war leader "was always at his very best in times of great strain, sorrow, and poignancy, when his culture, fortitude and magnanimity conjoined...
...But he does not realize tha Churchill did not have to do so...
...it was later agreed that this would be done by British scientists working on a "British" bomb at special facilities in the United States...
...Among Roosevelt's advisers with whom Churchill was in contact during the New Deal era was the Egyptian-born Rene Leon...
...His most recent book, D -Day, is published by John Wiley & Sons...
...Given that the whole war was a time of "great strain," it is a pity how frequently Churchill's dealings with Roosevelt are presented to Churchill's disadvantage...
...It is a pity that Black does not refer to Churchill's supportive comment, especially as he takes issue, and rightly so, with those British historians who have characterized Roosevelt's initiative in challenging Hitler so directly as "inept and ignorant...
...Roosevelt's firm stance, Churchill added, "has earned the gratitude of almost the whole world," both in regard to Germany and Japan...
...This reflection leads Black to refer to Roosevelt's "jejune methods of dispensing intimations and nuances in all directions and advancing imperceptibly within the cloud of incomprehensibility he had created...
...Roosevelt had it on his desk," Leon reported, "and was gazing at it with considerable interest...
...It is an important task for any biographer to explain and uphold his subject's point of view and perspective, but to do so by knocking or diminishing the point of view and perspective of Roosevelt's colleague-in-arms in the global conflict is not historically sound...
...In fact, when in early 1942 Churchill pressed for an Anglo-American cross-Channel invasion later that same year, it was Roosevelt who informed him, on March 7, 1942, that no such landing could take place for at least two years...
...Thus Black writes, with regard to Churchill not fully understanding the President's attitude after their first meeting (at sea, off Newfoundland), of "the conditions and qualifications and nuances with which Roosevelt clouded almost everything he said," so that Churchill, believing Roosevelt had made greater commitments than he had, "would have eagerly accepted the most positive possible interpretation of his words...
...A week before Pearl Harbor, Churchill proposed a stern message from Roosevelt to the Japanese, warning in the strongest language of the full consequences of any attack on the United States...
...Britain then had to negotiate a far weaker cooperation agreement, in which the United States was in full control of policy...
...Conrad Black has written a masterly biography, long, detailed, and absorbing...
...How that relationship is portrayed is the subject of this review...
...Roosevelt, by contrast, sometimes gets a severely critical eye...
...Black is also silent on Churchill's successful protest to Roosevelt, in 1943, to allow Jewish refugees a safe haven in recently liberated French North Africa...
...While his book was being written, Conrad Black (Lord Black of Crossharbour) left me a telephone message asking me to read the manuscript...
...An unexpected gap in these powerful pages relates to the Canadian industrialist Arthur Purvis...
...In vain did Churchill press Roosevelt to revive the previously agreed full exchange of information that would allow Britain to produce its own atom 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 bomb...
...and this is relevant to another episode Black does not explain, when, five years later, Roosevelt was pursuing his own American national interests with regard to the Soviet Union...
...An examination of Conrad Black's Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (Public Affairs, 1280 pages, $39.95...
...Roosevelt asked for assurances that Germany would not invade any more countries, of which he then listed more than a dozen, including Poland...
...Incidentally, in a biography of Roosevelt it would have been interesting to know of Roosevelt's involvement or non-involvement, or reaction to, the Dresden bombing: after all, it was not only a British but also an American raid, and Roosevelt was commander-in-chief of the American pilots and aircrew who dropped their bombs on Dresden as part of the Anglo-American joint response to the Soviet appeal...
...Nor is Churchill's meeting in October 1933 with Roosevelt's elder son James, who was among Churchill's dinner guests at his country home, Chartwell...
...The two men worked on the letter on Churchill's sixty-sixth birthday...
...It was through Purvis that Roosevelt suggested to Churchill a method of breaching his own most recent (American) Neutrality Act...
...Churchill drew the insignia of a pound sign and a dollar sign intertwined, saying to James Roosevelt: "Pray, bear this to your father from me...
...Black does not tell us the reason for Roosevelt's refusal to apply pressure on the Soviets in order to help the Poles in 1944...
...Tell him this must be the currency of the future...
...for a cross-Channel landing until the very end of 1943...
...It is surprising that Black, who often faults Churchill for being weak on the Soviet Union, does not complete the quotation...
...This is high praise...
...T HERE ARE in these pages a number of missed opportunities to show the full range of the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship (which adds to my personal embarrassment at not having realized that I was being asked to give guidance on such things...
...Indeed, I could find no reference at all to that meeting in these pages...
...Curiously, in writing about Churchill's angina—his first ever heart attack, while trying to open a window in his White House bedroom on December 26, 1941, during his first wartime visit to Washington—Black calls it "chest pains," thus lessening the drama of the event itself, the skill with which it was kept secret (until after Churchill'sdeath 23 years later), and the tenacity of Churchill's recovery...
...and it was preceded by eleven days of extraordinary exertions on Churchill's part...
...Black is also silent on Churchill's successful protest to Roosevelt in 1943, to allow Jewish refugees a safe haven in recently liberated French North Africa...
...The shortage of American landing craft involved, as late as February and March 1944 (at Eisenhower's insistence), a formidable intensification of United States production at dockyards in the United States...
...How can a Roosevelt biographer be silent on Churchill's positive response to that same initiative...
...Thy President rejected the Prime Minister's fears (o what Churchill called "these French slaughters") and the bombing went ahead...
...In this same message, Roosevelt mentioned June 1944 (the exact month of the Normandy landings) as the earliest date at which the troop-carrying capacity of United States vessels for any cross-Channel landing would reach the required 400,000 men...
...This advice was taken...
...When Churchill's turn came to JUNE 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 17 AVOIDABLE ERRORS answer, he said, without hesitation: "I wish to be Prime Minister and in close and daily communication by telephone with the President of the United States...
...Determined to find some area in which German troops could be brought to battle in the two years before a cross-Channel assault could be mounted, Churchill was to put his hopes in the Italian campaign, and briefly to consider a Norwegian landing option...
...Black makes no mention of how, a month after visiting Churchill at Chartwell in 1937, Leon discussed with Roosevelt his visit to Britain, reporting back to Churchill how "particularly pleased" the President was to hear of those Britons who were, like Churchill, "so definitely in favour of closer Anglo-American cooperation in the monetary field...
...He asked Purvis to redraft it, which Purvis did, eliminating a Churchill suggestion that Purvis feared "might give a handle to isolationist opposition...
...Commenting on Hitler's riposte, Churchill declared, in a radio broadcast to the United States (not mentioned by Black): "President Roosevelt is the object of a good many jibes and taunts from the German Fuhrer...
...This Black belatedly concedes...
...Churchill therefore decided that Britain would go it alone...
...The President is breast-high on our side and will do everything in his power to help," Churchill reported to his wife Clementine...
...This helps explain Churchill's confidence in Roosevelt as an ally after Churchill had become Prime Minister in May 1940...
...Had I realized what was being asked of me, I might have been able to have had a positive input to the Churchill aspects, filling some gaps and obviating some errors...
...He even quotes Churchill's description of Purvis's death as "a grievous loss," but he does not explain why...
...After Eisenhower insisted that the bombing was an essential prelude to the success of the landings, thetwo disputants appealed to Roosevelt...
...Roosevelt was right...
...Purvis also advised Churchill on when would be the most auspicious time to deliver the letter, arguably one of the most important ever written by Churchill...
...It soon emerged that while the American atom bomb program needed, and received, all the information it requested from the British on those parts of the American program where Britain was ahead, the Americans would not allow any exchange whatsoever the other way...
...The Soviet Chief of Staff was acting on German signals intelligence decrypts that had been provided to the Soviet Union by Britain, as a matter of routine...
...They do not in any way detract from the power and value of this impressive book...
...That really was such an important contribution by Roosevelt to the saving of Jewish lives that it ought to have been included in this comprehensive book...
...There are a number of avoidable errors in these absorbing pages...
...Black criticizes Churchill for not follow ing up this request...
...It is here that Black writes most forcefully, and most forcefully takes the side of the President, to the often exaggerated depreciation of Churchill...
...Churchill effectively drafted this message, including the phrase "that any further aggression by Japan will lead immediately to the gravest consequences...
...Nor is there any mention of Churchill's immediate follow-up to Roosevelt's concerns...
...Might not this link between Churchill and Roosevelt—as important as the bust of Churchill in 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 President George W. Bush's Oval Office—have had a place in Black's comprehensive account...
...0 N THE BOMBING OF DRESDEN in February 1945, Black writes: "It was probably, morally, the most dubious of Churchill's initiatives...
...BY MARTIN GILBERT T WTITE THIS CRITIQUE WITH SOME EMBARRASSMENT...
...It is quite wrong to say that Churchill "delayed Overlord with his excursions in the Mediterranean...
...Roosevelt eventually deferred to Churchill's humane request...
...They were fact, not claims...
...It was Purvis who, with his knowledge "The President is breast-high on our side and will do everything in his power to help," Churchill reported to his wife, Clementine...
...In June 1942, in Washington, Roosevelt agreed with Churchill that Britain could embark on full-scale atom bomb production...
...Their relationship, their meetings and their correspondence form a central element in Roosevelt's story...
...By an unfortunate error in transmission, I thought he had asked me to comment on "a" book about Roosevelt—presumably by somebody else—as part of his own keen interest in history...
...After dinner Churchill initiated a guessing game, asking each of those present to say their greatest wish...
...JUNE 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 21 AVOIDABLE ERRORS rescue efforts, protecting Jews from Hungarian-Fascist attack, and the deportation to concentration camps in Austria...
Vol. 37 • June 2004 • No. 5
