Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [138]
Much worse, however, was the U.S. president’s attempt to meddle with what the prime minister perceived as an exclusively British issue. It would never have occurred to Churchill to offer advice to Roosevelt about the future governance of America’s Philippines dependency. He deemed it rank cant for a nation which had itself colonised the North American continent, dispossessing and largely exterminating its indigenous population, and which still practised racial segregation, to harangue others about the treatment of native peoples.
Here was an early, wholly unwelcome foretaste of the future. The United States, principal partner and paymaster of the alliance to defeat Fascism, was bent upon exercising decisive influence on the postwar global settlement. Churchill, who thought of nothing save victory and knew how remote this was in April 1942, found Roosevelt’s heavy-handedness irksome. He lost no time in flagging both his determination to stand fast against the Indian National Congress’s demands, and his sensitivity about American meddling. “Anything like a serious difference between you501 and me would break my heart,” he wrote to the president on April 12, “and would surely deeply injure both our countries at the height of this terrible struggle.” Roosevelt’s belief that the day of empires was done would achieve postwar vindication with a speed even he might have found surprising. Britain’s exercise of power over the Indian people between 1939 and 1945 was clumsy and ugly, and Churchill must bear some of the blame. But the prime minister was surely right in believing that a transfer of power in the midst of a world war was wholly unrealistic, especially when the Indian Congress’s attitude to the Allied cause was equivocal.
The spring of 1942 brought some lifting of Allied spirits, especially after the U.S. Navy inflicted heavy damage on the Japanese in the May 4 Battle of the Coral Sea. Churchill changed his mind yet again about acceding to Russian demands for recognition of their territorial claims on Poland and the Baltic states. “We must remember that this is a bad thing,”502 he told the Cabinet. “We oughtn’t to do it, and I shan’t be sorry if we don’t.” On May 5, British forces landed in Madagascar, seeking to preempt a possible Japanese coup. Churchill wrote to his son, Randolph: “The depression following Singapore503 has been replaced by an undue optimism, which I am of course keeping in proper bounds.” He was much wounded by the criticisms that had fallen upon him since January. Before he made a national broadcast on May 10, he drafted a passage which he subsequently—and surely wisely—omitted to deliver, but which reflected the pain he had suffered in recent months:
Everyone feels safer now504, and in consequence the weaker brethren become more vocal. Our critics are not slow to dwell upon the misfortunes and reverses which we have sustained, and I am certainly not going to pretend that there have not been many mistakes and shortcomings. In particular, I am much blamed by a group of ex-ministers for my general conduct of the war. They would very much like to reduce my power of direction and initiative.
Though I have to strive with dictators, I am not, I am glad to say, a dictator myself. I am only your servant. I have tried to be your faithful servant but at any moment, acting through the House of Commons, you can dismiss me to private life. There is one thing, however, which I hope you will not do; I hope you will never ask me or any successor you may choose to bear the burden of responsibility in times like these without reasonable authority and the means of taking decisions.
Hugh