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’ view of the shore. Augusta slid away into a fog, as sailors lined the side of Prince of Wales to salute the departing president. Then the British set their own course for home. “It was hard to tell whether Churchill385 returned from Newfoundland entirely satisfied with his conference with Roosevelt,” wrote Ian Jacob. The prime minister told his son, Randolph, that he had enjoyed “a very interesting and by no means unfruitful meeting386 with the president … and in the three days when we were continually together, I feel we made a deep and intimate contact of friendship. At the same time one is deeply perplexed to know how the deadlock is to be broken and the United States brought boldly and honourably into the war.”

Churchill revealed nothing of his private disappointment in the exuberant rhetoric with which he addressed his colleagues and the nation on returning to Britain. He felt obliged to satisfy their craving for good news, and told the War Cabinet that American naval commanders were bursting with impatience to join the struggle, though others at Placentia detected nothing of the kind. His report of Roosevelt’s private remarks appears wilfully to have exaggerated the president’s carefully equivocal expressions of support. Pownall, now Dill’s vice CIGS, wrote in his diary: “Roosevelt is all for coming into the war387, and as soon as possible … But he said that he would never declare war, he wishes to provoke it.” Uncertainty persists about whether the president really used these words, or whether Churchill put them into his mouth. Even such sentiments fell short of British hopes. For all the president’s social warmth, he never indulged romantic lunges of the kind to which Churchill was prone. If not quite an Anglophobe, Roosevelt never revealed much private warmth towards Britain. He left Placentia with the same mind-set he had taken there. He was bent upon assisting the British by all possible means to avert defeat. But he had no intention of outpacing congressional and popular sentiment by leading a dash towards U.S. belligerence. American public opinion was vastly more supportive of its government’s oil embargo against Japan, in response to Tokyo’s descent on Indochina, than it was of Roosevelt’s increasing naval support for Britain in the Battle of the Atlantic; this, ironically, though the embargo provoked the Japanese to bomb America into the war.

Churchill, at an off-the-record British newspaper editors’ briefing on August 22, predicted that Japan would not attack in the east, and observed that the Battle of the Atlantic was going better. Suggesting that German U-boats would be reluctant to risk tangling with American warships, which were now operating actively in the western Atlantic, he said: “I assume that Hitler does not want to risk a clash with Roosevelt until the Russians are out of the way.” The flush of British excitement faded. The prime minister’s lofty rhetoric could not overcome a sense of anticlimax, which extended across the nation. A War Office clerk seemed to a British general to judge Placentia rightly when he dismissed Churchill’s broadcast, describing the meeting as “nothing dressed up very nicely.”388

Vere Hodgson, the Notting Hill charity worker, heard the BBC promise “an important government announcement” on the afternoon of August 14, and expected a declaration of Anglo-American union. When, instead, radio listeners heard the words of the Atlantic Charter, she wrote in disappointment: “There was a statement of War Aims389. All very laudable in themselves—the only difficulty will be in carrying them out.” Churchill cabled Hopkins, revealing unusually explicit impatience: “I ought to tell you that there has been a wave of depression390 through cabinet and other informed circles here about President’s many assurances about no commitments and no closer to war, etc … If 1942 opens with Russia knocked out and Britain left again alone, all kinds of dangers may arise. I do not think Hitler will help in any way … You know best whether anything more can be done … Should be grateful if you could