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minister establishing himself for weeks on end at the White House, engaged in strategic discussions with the president from which they were often absent. Marshall, an intensely moral man, deplored casual intermingling of professional and social intercourse—so much so that he always refused invitations to stay at Hyde Park, the Roosevelt estate on the Hudson River in upstate New York. So strict was his personal austerity that when he added a chicken run to his quarters at Fort Myer, he insisted upon paying personally for the materials used in its construction. Unfamiliar with the promiscuity of Churchill’s conversation, he resented every moment of the visitor’s intimacies with Roosevelt. “The British,446” wrote Henry Stimson, “are evidently taking advantage of the president’s well-known shortcomings in ordinary administrative methods.” Hopkins cautioned Roosevelt against agreeing to military decisions in the absence of Marshall. Yet, to the army chief of staff’s fury, Roosevelt accepted Churchill’s proposal that, if the Philippines fell, residual American forces should be redeployed to Singapore.

Marshall was even more hostile than Roosevelt to British imperial pretensions. And while from the outset the president’s imagination was seized by the notion of a North African landing, Marshall’s was not. He and his colleagues were irked by a perceived British assumption that they could now draw on United States manpower and weapons “as if these had been swept into447 a common pool for campaigns tailored to suit the interests and convenience of Great Britain,” in the words of a Marshall biographer. “From the British standpoint it was easy to conclude that a course of action favorable to their national interest was simply good strategic sense and that failure of the Americans to agree showed inexperience, immaturity and bad manners.” From the first day of the war, Marshall was bent upon engaging the Germans in northwest Europe at the earliest possible date and avoiding entanglement in British “sideshows.”

The only British officer with whom Marshall forged a close relationship was Dill. Ironically, the discarded CIGS now became a significant figure in the Anglo-American partnership. By an inspired stroke, when Churchill went home he left behind in Washington a somewhat reluctant Dill, who was shortly afterwards appointed chief of the British military mission. Between the embassy and the mission—housed in the U.S. Public Health Building on Constitution Avenue—there were soon nine thousand British uniformed and civilian personnel in Washington. Dill also became the British representative on the newly created Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee when it met in Washington in the absence of Pound, Brooke and Portal. Halifax, as ambassador, achieved no intimacy with the Americans, and it was never plausible that he should do so. Dill was understandably bemused by his new appointment: “It is odd that Winston should want me448 to represent him here when he clearly was glad of an excuse to get me out of the CIGS job.” But he became Marshall’s confidant, a sensitive interpreter of the two nations’ military aspirations. In the years that followed, Dill made a notable contribution to the Grand Alliance, calming transatlantic storms and explaining rival viewpoints. He prospered as a diplomat where he had failed as a director of strategy.

Churchill’s first visit to Washington was thus a public triumph, but a less assured private one. Still, he was wise to bask while he could in the sunshine of the new American relationship. Back at home, many troubles awaited him. History perceives 1940, when Britain stood alone, as the pivotal year for the nation’s survival. Yet 1942 would prove the most torrid phase of Churchill’s war premiership. The British people, so staunch amid the threat of invasion, two years later showed themselves weary and fractious. Amid the reality of crushing defeats, they tired of promises of prospective victories. In peace or war, the patience of democracies is seldom great. That of Britain had been progressively eroded by bombardment,