Winston Churchill's War Leadership - Martin Gilbert [23]
Churchill ended his letter to Roosevelt on a personal note. “Forgive me, my dear friend, for presuming to press such a course upon you, but I am convinced that it might make all the difference and prevent a melancholy extension of the war.” No such American message was sent. At that very moment, the Japanese fleet was already in its final stages of preparation for the torpedo bomb attack on Pearl Harbor and an amphibious landing against the British in Malaya. Churchill did not know these developments. His instinct to make direct appeals, to send messages that were clear and unequivocal, to try to influence the adversary by words and arguments before bombs fell and war broke out was a strong element of his war leadership. He understood the setbacks, the suffering, and the danger to Britain that would follow from any widening of the war, whether by Italy in 1940 or by Japan in 1941.
Face-to-face negotiations were another feature of Churchill’s conduct of war policy. Five years after the war he was to coin the word “summit” for what were to become the regular, high-level meetings of Heads of State and an essential feature of détente. In 1940, among his first acts as Prime Minister, Churchill made three visits to France to meet the French leaders and to attempt to strengthen their will to remain at war. These visits took place as the German army was pushing deep into France. They involved uncomfortable and risky journeys by air, and they meant leaving his command post in London. Churchill believed, however, that the power of personal intervention could be crucial, and that it would be wrong not to try to bolster French resolve by his presence and his arguments. In the end, the overwhelming power of the German army and air force could not be resisted, nor was Churchill able before the fall of Paris to persuade Roosevelt to stiffen French resolve by an American declaration. But the efforts he made to cross over to France, to put his points as forcefully as he could to the French leaders, set a pattern of direct involvement in negotiations at the highest level that became a hall-mark of his war leadership.
In August 1941, while the United States was still neutral, Churchill went by sea—on the ill-fated Prince of Wales—to the coast of Newfoundland to meet Roosevelt, the first of their many war conferences. Roosevelt never made the journey to Britain. Rather, it was Churchill who made more long journeys to conferences and essential discussions than any other war leader. Later in the war, Churchill met Roosevelt at Casablanca and Malta, first to work out a common war policy, and then a common peace policy in advance of meeting Stalin. Twice Churchill flew to Moscow to talk directly to Stalin. He also travelled to Teheran and Yalta, with Roosevelt, to discuss every aspect of inter-Allied policy with Stalin: the first two meetings of the Big Three.
These journeys, long and arduous even by air, took a great deal out of Churchill physically, but he knew the importance of putting the British case to those who would have the power actually to accede to it. The meetings with Stalin were not a success, despite a considerable effort by Churchill to defer to Stalin’s needs. Churchill’s repeated efforts to persuade Stalin to allow Poland to have democratic elections after the war appeared to succeed at Yalta, but then Stalin reneged on his promise. With the Red Army the master of Warsaw, there was nothing more that Churchill could do. But he had expended many hours arguing the case for an independent post-war Poland with the Soviet leader, and he had spent as many hours trying to convince the Polish government in London to make concessions. He hoped to get some agreement with the Soviets that would guarantee Polish sovereignty, a Poland that would lose its eastern provinces (its eastern third) to the Soviet Union but would gain a large slice of the industrial region of eastern Germany and the southern half of East Prussia. Churchill