The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [75]
Churchill had been furious when Wavell drew up a ‘Worst Possible Case’ Plan for withdrawing the British Army from Egypt altogether. ‘Wavell has 400,000 men,’ the Prime Minister blustered. ‘If they lose Egypt, blood will flow. I will have firing parties to shoot the generals.’28 Wavell never tried to shift the blame on to other shoulders; when finally he was packed off to be commander-in-chief in India on 22 June 1941 he bore the humiliation stoically, perhaps even welcoming it, and agreed with Churchill’s telegram that said ‘a new hand and a new eye’, in the shape of General Sir Claude Auchinleck, were required.
The story was not entirely woeful for Britain throughout the Middle East in the spring and summer of 1941. Between April and August, the British had acted decisively in three important areas – Iraq, Syria and Iran – to protect and guarantee her all-important oil supplies for what turned out to be the rest of the war. ‘The campaigns were not large,’ writes their historian, ‘they were conducted without much fanfare and each with laughably limited resources… but they were crucial for Britain’s survival.’29 Although the (still neutral) United States produced 83 per cent of the world’s oil in 1941, and the Middle East only 5 per cent, American oil had to be shipped over the submarine-infested Atlantic and had to be paid for in Britain’s rapidly diminishing hard currency. The 8.6 million tons of Iranian and 4.3 million tons of Iraqi oil that fuelled Britain’s ships and tanks each year did not.
Worth more than hard currency, however, were the agreements that Churchill and Roosevelt came to at their momentous meeting, codenamed Riviera, at Placentia Bay, off the village of Argentia in south-east Newfoundland from 9 to 12 August 1941. Churchill arrived in the 35,000-ton battleship HMS Prince of Wales and Roosevelt in the heavy cruiser USS Augusta and their conversations set the (very wide) parameters for Anglo-American co-operation for the next three years of the conflict. Before the United States entered the war, the Roosevelt Administration had afforded Britain invaluable help, and Placentia Bay was to see this greatly increased. As well as allowing Britain to buy much-needed arms and other vital supplies under the Lend-Lease system, the United States Navy had given the Royal Navy fifty destroyers in return for long leases on various British military bases in September 1940, and had also begun patrolling areas of the Western Atlantic against U-boats in such a way that had led to several clashes, usually to the Germans’ cost. Yet at Placentia Bay this spirit of help and co-operation was massively extended, aided by an instantly good personal rapport that sprang up between Roosevelt and Churchill, who had not seen one another since an inauspicious meeting in 1918 (an occasion that Churchill had forgotten all about anyway).30
As well as agreeing that, in the event of having to fight against Germany and Japan simultaneously, Britain and the United States would concentrate on defeating Germany first, a crucial consideration for the hard-pressed British, on 12 August Roosevelt and Churchill signed what was soon afterwards dubbed the Atlantic Charter by the Daily Herald of London. This succeeded in putting eight Anglo-American war aims into a single, stirring declaration, one that emphasized the democratic, progressive values for which so many people were fighting and dying. By the following January it had been signed by twenty-four more countries.
The preamble announced that the two leaders, ‘being met together, deem it right to make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries on which they base their hopes for a better future for the world’. It then stated that Britain and America ‘seek no aggrandisement, territorial or other’, ‘desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’, ‘respect the rights of all people