Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [108]
At Downing Street, Churchill observed irritably that Americans had committed themselves to suffer all the inconveniences of war, “without its commanding stimuli.” Over dinner with John Winant, the U.S. ambassador, on August 29, he again appealed explicitly for American belligerence. Colville recorded: “The PM said that after the joint declaration391 [the Atlantic Charter], America could not honourably stay out … If R declared war now … they might see victory as early as 1943; but if she did not, the war might drag on for years, leaving Britain undefeated but civilization in ruins.” Influential American visitors continued to be courted with unflagging zeal. The journalist John Gunther was entertained at Chequers. A tedious Pennsylvania Democrat, Congressman J. Buell Snyder, chairman of the House military appropriations subcommittee, was warmly received at Downing Street. Yet at the end of August Charles Peake, minister at Britain’s Washington embassy, expressed profound gloom about the prospect of the United States entering the war soon, perhaps at all. He even questioned—as did some392 members of the U.S. administration—whether Roosevelt desired such an outcome. Although America could no longer be deemed neutral, it seemed plausible that it might cling indefinitely to nonbelligerent status. There was, and remains, no evidence that Roosevelt was willing to risk a potentially disastrous clash with Congress. Unless America became a fighting ally, Lend-Lease would merely suffice to stave off British defeat.
The autumn of 1941 was one of many wartime seasons which must be viewed without the benefit of hindsight about what followed. British prospects everywhere seemed bleak. An American diplomat who spent ten days in Scotland returned to report to his embassy: “The attitude of the people he had been with393, most of them big industrialists and realists in their points of view, is that the British are now losing the war, and that it is ridiculous to talk about subduing the German Army by bombing cities inside Germany … The German Army … must be beaten somehow or other on the ground, or the war is lost.” Churchill agreed. “It will not be possible for the whole British Army394 (other than those in the Middle East) to remain indefinitely inert and passive as a garrison of this island against invasion,” Churchill wrote to Ismay on September 12. “Such a course, apart altogether from military considerations, would bring the Army into disrepute. I do not need to elaborate this.”
Moscow regarded the meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt with its accustomed paranoia. A Soviet biographer of Churchill, writing more than thirty years later, asserted that at Placentia Bay, “plans were worked out to establish395 Anglo-American domination of the post-war world. The leaders of Britain and the USA were drawing up these plans while the USSR was bearing the brunt of the war and America had not yet entered it.” Stalin, in desperate straits, wanted thirty thousand tons of aluminium, together with four hundred planes and five hundred tanks a month from Britain. Churchill told Ambassador Maisky that Moscow would have to be content with half these quantities, and look to the Americans for the rest. On September 15, Stalin demanded that twenty-five British divisions should be sent to the Russian front via Iran or Archangel. He had already asked Harry Hopkins to solicit Roosevelt to dispatch an American army to Russia. Hopkins, suitably amazed, said that even if the United States entered the war, it was unlikely that she would send soldiers to fight in the Caucasus.
It was a measure of Churchill’s anxiety to appease Moscow that he agreed in principle to send British troops to Russia. He speculated wildly that Wavell, a Russian speaker, might command such a force. To try to assist the Russians and fail, he declared, was better than to make no attempt. He was flailing. On October 23, the notion was formally abandoned. Stalin complained that badly crated British aircraft were arriving “broken” at Archangel. The British hoped against