April 5, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 54

The Special Relationship ReflectsWhat Allies Really Are

By Sir Max Hastings

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Sir Max Hugh Macdonald Hastings FRSL is a British journalist, editor, historian and prolific author. His Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45 was reviewed in Finest Hour 146. His latest book, Inferno: The World at War 1939-1945, is published by Albert Knopf.

Churchill from the earliest days of the war understood that only American assistance could enable Britain to survive, only American belligerence could make possible the defeat of Nazism. He displayed supreme wisdom in his grasp of the need to clasp Roosevelt’s people in the closest possible embrace, when many of the British people high and low spurned them.

Lord Halifax, whom Churchill dis- patched to become Britain’s Washington ambassador in December 1940, once said: “I have never liked Americans, except odd ones. In the mass I have always found them dreadful.” Lord Linlithgow, as Viceroy of India, wrote to commiserate with Halifax on his posting: “the heavy labour of toadying to your pack of pole-squatting parvenus! What a country, and what savages those who inhabit it!”

As for U.S. attitudes to the British, the historian Sir Michael Howard, in 1941 an Oxford student, has written: “It is never very easy for the British to understand that a very large number of Americans, if they think about us at all, do so with various degrees of dislike and contempt….In the 1940s the Americans had some reason to regard the British as a lot of toffee-nosed bastards who oppressed half the world and had a sinister talent for getting other people to do their fighting for them.”

A Gallup poll in July 1942 invited Americans to say which nation they thought was trying hardest to win the war. A loyal 37% answered the U.S.; 30% named Russia, 14% China and 13% offered no opinion. Just 6% identified the British as most convincing tryers.

In making a broad judgement about Anglo-American relations, it seems useful to reflect a little about just what allies are. It is un- heard-of in history for two sovereign nations to achieve concord across the whole range of policy. Countries become allies because they discover one, and occasionally a few more, objectives in common. Almost always, this includes a shared enemy. Marlborough in the 18th century led British and Dutch forces against the French, as Wellington led British, Spanish and Portuguese troops a hundred years later. Such relationships have always been highly fractious.

No other statesman could have con- ducted British policy towards the U.S. with such consummate skill as Churchill, nor have achieved such personal influence upon the American people. This persisted until 1944, when it declined precipitously, to revive only when the onset of the Cold War caused many Americans to hail Churchill as a prophet.

It was a perverse feature of the war that while the British people showed huge admiration for Russian achievements, they seldom displayed the same generosity towards Americans. A Home Intelligence report of 14 January 1943 declared: “At the time of Pearl Harbor, public interest in the U.S. received a momentary stimulus which soon declined and has (in marked contrast to the attitude to Russia and things Russian) remained low ever since.” In February 1943 a Londoner reported meeting a vegetable seller in Covent Garden who said, “Good news today, sir!” He replied, “Have the Russians done well?” “No,” said the vegetable man, “the Americans have got the knock.” This, asserted the diarist, Violet Bonham-Carter, represented “the universal reaction” to news of the reverse which had befallen Eisenhower’s army at Kasserine Pass.

In their hearts most Britons knew that their country could accomplish nothing alone, that only American resources had averted Hitler’s ultimate triumph. But it was sometimes hard to feel gratitude, amid British consciousness that the struggle was reducing their own nation to penury, while America grew relentlessly in wealth and might. If many upper-crust Britons hoped that the Russians and Germans would destroy each other in the course of the war, many Americans seemed well pleased by the prospect of the British Empire becoming a casualty of victory.

The extravagant rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill about the Grand Alliance causes some historians even to this day wildly to overstate the harmony and intimacy of their personal relations. They are sometimes described as friends. This seems mistaken: they created a friendship of State, something quite different.

One reason Stalin became the most successful warlord of World War II was that he understood with icy clarity something that often eluded the Anglo-Americans. The three allied powers became conjoined to defeat a common enemy, but this in no way altered the fact that on almost everything else, their purposes were at odds. This applied also, if in lesser degree, between Britain and the United States.

In 1940-41, before America became a belligerent, Washington insisted on payment of cash on the nail for every ton of arms and supplies shipped across the Atlantic, until the British had exhausted their entire gold holdings and foreign investment portfolio, some of which had to be sold to U.S. companies at fire sale prices. Churchill was appalled by this, and wrote to Roosevelt on 7 December 1940, saying that if the cash drain continued, his nation would find itself in a position in which “after the victory was won with our blood and sweat, and civilization saved and the time gained for the U.S. to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.”

Roosevelt never responded to this point, and his evasion seems highly significant. The President identified a powerful American interest in Britain’s continued resistance—and displayed extraordinary energy and imagination to make public and congressional opinion recognise this—but not in Britain’s postwar solvency. American policy throughout the war emphasised the importance of strengthening the U.S. post- war competitive trading position vis-à-vis its ally. Indeed the terms of Lend-Lease imposed harsh constraints on, for instance, British civil aviation. The U.S. was unflinching in shaping policy to do as little as possible to assist the preservation of the British Empire, a purpose which it deplored, with special emphasis on India. Growing awareness of this caused Churchill much dismay, though his belief never wavered that fostering the American alliance was a core purpose to which all else must be subordinated.

By 1944-45 the British, and Churchill in particular, had become privately angry and bitter at what they perceived as intolerably overbearing American behaviour towards themselves. I will quote just one example of just how tough Washington could be.

In December 1944, there was hunger verging upon starvation in Italy and indeed all Europe. A British embassy official in Washington visited Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy to protest against the policy of monopolising precious shipping to transport fantastically extravagant quantities of supplies to American forces overseas, while liberated civilians were in desperate straits. “In order to win the war,” the British visitor demanded of McCloy, “were we not imperilling the political and social fabric of European civilization on which the future peace of the world depends?”

His subsequent memo to the Foreign Office records: “This drew from Mr. McCloy the immediate rejoinder that it was a British interest to remember that, as a result of the complete change in the economic and financial position of the British Commonwealth which the war had brought about, we, in the U.K., depended at least as much upon the U.S. as we did upon Europe. Was it wise to risk losing the support of the U.S. in seeking the support of Western Europe? This was what was involved.”

The shocked British official persisted in pressing the case for feeding Europe’s civilians. McCloy, too, stuck to his guns. He asserted that it would be fatal for Britain “to argue that the war in the Pacific should be retarded in order that the civilian population of Europe should be fed.” The Foreign Office in London professed acute dismay on reading the record of this meeting. But British impotence in the face of American dominance remained inescapable.

That is only one example of the sort of exchanges which took place between the two allied capitals in the latter part of the war, supposedly a halcyon era of Anglo-American relations. The Americans were in the driving seat. They knew it, and were determined to impose their will. Brigadier Vivian Dykes of the British Military Mission in Washington wrote home: “We simply hold no cards at all, but London expects us to work miracles. It is a hard life.” Curiously enough, at that time the U.S. adopted a more indulgent attitude to the third party in the alliance, the Soviet Union. Until his death, Roosevelt harboured delusions about the working relationship that might be possible with Stalin, such as Churchill had abandoned years earlier.

Now, my point in all the above is emphatically not to suggest that the wartime Anglo-American relationship was a sham or a failure. On the contrary, at an operational level it proved the most successful military alliance in history. Professor Harry Nicholas has writ- ten that what was attained was “a much higher degree of cooperation and unforced fusion than had ever before existed between two sovereign states.” It is merely that we are foolish to idealise it, to fail to recognise that it rested, and always will, not upon sentiment but upon perceptions of respective national interest. It represented a partnership committed to a certain purpose—in the 1940s, defeat of the Axis— rather than a marriage of minds between peoples or governments, such as never could and never can be attainable. One of the commonest mistakes made by some British people, including sometimes their prime ministers, in conducting relations with Americans, is to suppose that our two peoples are alike. We in- deed share many values and beliefs, but our cultures are nonetheless quite dissimilar.

The phrase “Special Relation- ship” always seems a rather pathetic British conceit, which American presidents indulge as a courtesy, knowing that some of our politicians attribute to it totemic significance. It implies that we hope, or even expect, to receive breaks from Washington which other nations do not. Yet only in very rare cases does anglophilia influence American behaviour. To say this does not, I hope and trust, suggest British chippiness, but rather a degree of realism which seems indispensable to historians of the Second World War in the 21st century.

Our differences have not prevented us from achieving a remarkable amount together. With the coming of the Cold War after 1945, the United States and Britain became the foremost players in the NATO alliance—a huge success in shielding Western Europe against the Soviet Union. Close military and intelligence collaboration was superbly sustained through more than forty years, and the latter especially continues to the present day. But meanwhile, on many other bi- lateral issues tensions and differences persisted between Washington and London, as they must. What matters, to justify the continuance of this like any other alliance, is to identify a relatively narrow range of big things about which the two countries can agree, acknowledging that on many others, they will not. This seems as true now as it was in 1945.