Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [102]
The threat of Japanese aggression against the British Empire in the Far East dogged Churchill that summer of 1941. Germany was fully committed in Russia. Britain’s land forces in North Africa seemed to have a real prospect of victory against the Italians and such German troops as Hitler was willing to spare from the Eastern Front. But if Japan attacked, the strategic balance would once more be overturned. Cadogan, at the Foreign Office, wrote in July that Churchill was “frightened of nothing but Japan.”372 The prime minister expressed confidence that, if Tokyo moved against the British Empire, the Americans would intervene. His ministers, generals and officials were much less convinced. It was a nightmare prospect: that Britain might find itself at war in the east while America remained neutral. Some thought it likely that Japan would join Germany’s attack on Russia, rather than strike at Malaya. Eden asked Churchill what he would do in such an eventuality. The prime minister replied firmly that Britain would never herself initiate hostilities with Japan, unless the United States did so. Month after month in 1941, he sought to promote the illusion that Britain’s war effort was viable and purposeful. In private, however, he recognised its ultimate futility unless Roosevelt’s nation came in with both feet.
2. Walking Out
THAT SUMMER, countless hours were expended by British diplomats, staff officers and the prime minister himself, weighing and debating every subtlety of U.S. behaviour and opinion. Few lovers expended as much ink and thought upon wartime correspondence as did the prime minister on his long letters to Roosevelt, sometimes dispatched twice or thrice weekly, in which he described the progress of Britain’s war. He adopted a confiding tone, taking it for granted that the president shared his own, and his country’s, purposes. He extended his courtship to the president’s people. On June 16, the award in absentia of an honorary doctorate from the University of Rochester, New York, inspired one of his finest radio broadcasts to Americans:
A wonderful story is unfolding373 before our eyes. How it will end we are not allowed to know. But on both sides of the Atlantic we all feel—I repeat, all—that we are a part of it, that our future and that of many generations is at stake. We are sure that the character of human society will be shaped by the resolves we take and the deeds we do. We need not bewail the fact that we have been called upon to face such solemn responsibilities. We may be proud, and even rejoice amid our tribulations, that we have been born at this cardinal time for so great an age and so splendid an opportunity of service here below. Wickedness—enormous, panoplied, embattled, seemingly triumphant—casts its shadow over Europe and Asia. Laws, customs, and traditions are broken up. Justice is cast from her seat. The rights of the weak are trampled down. The grand freedoms of which the President of the United States has spoken so movingly are spurned and chained. The whole stature of man, his genius, his initiative, and his nobility, is ground down under systems of mechanical barbarism and of organized and scheduled terror.
Churchill’s words moved many people in his audience. Yet in Washington, Halifax observed wearily that trying to pin down the Americans was like “a disorderly day’s rabbit-shooting.”374 Roosevelt offered much to Britain—aircrew training, warship repair facilities, the loan of transports, an American garrison to replace British troops in Iceland, secret military staff talks throughout February and