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in Congress and in the media who were fiercely reluctant to offer Stalin open cheques on the U.S. Treasury. Roosevelt, like Churchill, stood head and shoulders above his military advisers in his understanding of the importance of supporting Russia’s war. While American deliveries, like those of Britain, lagged far behind promises, without the exercise of the president’s utmost personal authority the Soviet Union would have been denied food, commodities, vehicles and equipment that became vital to its war effort.

In Washington, the Allies agreed to a vast increase in U.S. weapons production—Beaverbrook made a useful contribution by urging the feasibility of this on Roosevelt. It would be more than two years before the full effects became apparent on the battlefield. The Americans, including George Marshall, were slow to grasp the length of the inevitable delay between decisions to arm and achievement of capability to unleash upon the enemy the vast war machine they planned to create. But a beginning was made at Arcadia. On January 5, Churchill flew to Florida for five days’ warmth, rest and work. He revised the strategy papers he had composed on the voyage from Britain. Amid the obvious determination of the U.S. Chiefs of Staff to grapple with the German army, he committed himself to “large offensive operations” in Europe in 1943. This, even though news from the battlefronts was turning sour again. Rommel had been able to extricate seven German and Italian divisions from the desert battle, and was regrouping in Tripolitana. The Japanese were storming down the Malay Peninsula, prompting the first stab of apprehension about Singapore. Large reinforcements were being rushed to “the fortress,” as Churchill so mistakenly called the island.

Then there were a few more days with Roosevelt. “They tell me I have done a good job here,”434 Churchill said to Bernard Baruch. The financier replied: “You have done a one hundred per cent job. But now you ought to get the hell out of here.” The visitor was in danger of outstaying his welcome. The president had grown bored with the relentless, self-indulgent sparring between the prime minister and Beaverbrook. While never lacking confidence in the superior might of the nation which he himself led, Roosevelt found that it became tiring to live alongside the Englishman’s bombastic presence. He was glad to see his guests go. Churchill wrote in his memoirs: “The time had now come when I must leave435 the hospitable and exhilarating atmosphere of the White House and of the American nation, erect and infuriate against tyrants and aggressors. It was to no sunlit prospect that I must return.” He knew with what dismay the British nation must greet the torrent of ill tidings from the Far East, which had yet to reach a flood.

The president said to the prime minister at their parting, “Trust me to the bitter end.” Then Churchill took off in a Boeing Clipper flying boat, one of three such aircraft purchased from the Americans the previous year. The Clipper flew low and slow, but offered its passengers a magnificent standard of comfort and cuisine. Dinner, served between Bermuda and Plymouth, consisted of consommé, shrimp cocktail, filet mignon with fresh vegetables, dessert, coffee, champagne and liqueurs. Then the passengers were able to retire to bunks, though Churchill wandered restlessly during the night. They landed in Britain on the morning of January 17, after an eighteen-hour flight. That evening, the prime minister briefed the War Cabinet. “An Olympian calm” prevailed at the White House, he said. “It was perhaps rather isolated. The president had no adequate link between his will and executive action.” The British found the State Department “jumpy.” Cordell Hull had been enraged by the unheralded Free French seizure of the tiny Vichy-held islands of St.-Pierre and Miquelon, off Newfoundland, a development which wasted precious Anglo-American time and goodwill to resolve. Amery noted wryly436 that, in Churchill’s report to the Cabinet, he did not trouble to mention his visit to Canada.

But the