• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He persuaded Washington that a new summit was now needed, to settle plans for Italy. This meeting, Quadrant, was to be held in Quebec. On August 5, 1943, he stood on the platform at Addison Road Station, in west Kensington, singing, “I go away / This very day / To sail across the sea / Matilda.” Then his train slid from its platform northwards to Greenock, where his two hundred–strong delegation boarded the Queen Mary, once more bound for Canada. Churchill landed at Halifax on August 9, and remained in North America until September 14, by far his longest wartime sojourn there. Since it was plain that the big decisions on future strategy would be taken by Americans, as usual he sought to be on the spot, to deploy the weight of his own personality to influence them. While the Combined Chiefs of Staff began their debates in Quebec, Churchill travelled by train with his wife and daughter Mary to stay with Roosevelt. At Niagara Falls, he told reporters: “I saw these before you were born. I was here first in 1900.” A correspondent asked fatuously: “Do they look the same?” Churchill said: “Well, the principle seems the same. The water still keeps flowing over.”

At Hyde Park it was stifling barbecue weather, and grilled hamburgers and hot dogs were served. Churchill fumed about reports of Nazi mass killings in the Balkans. He sought to interest the president in the region, with little success. Then the two leaders travelled to join the discussions of their Chiefs of Staff. The venue had been chosen to suit common Anglo-American convenience, without much heed to the fact that it lay on Canadian soil. Moran wrote that Canada’s premier, Mackenzie King, resembled a man who has lent his house for a party: “The guests take hardly any notice of him751, but just before leaving they remember he is their host and say pleasant things.” Secretary of State Cordell Hull was permitted by Roosevelt to make one of his rare summit appearances at Quadrant, not much to his own satisfaction. Unwilling to share Churchill’s late hours, one midnight Hull announced grumpily that he was going to bed. The prime minister expressed astonishment: “Why, man, we are at war!”

Stalin was making threatening demands for a Russian voice in the governance of occupied territories. He cabled from Moscow, demanding the creation of a joint military commission, which should hold its first meeting in Sicily. In Quebec, Churchill warned the Americans of “bloody consequences in the future … Stalin is an unnatural man. There will be grave troubles.” He was correct, of course. Thereafter, the Russians perceived the legitimisation of their own conduct in eastern Europe. Since the Western Allies decreed the governance of territories which they occupied, the Soviet Union considered itself entitled to do likewise in its own conquests.

But the central issue at stake at Quebec was that of Overlord. The Americans were implacably set upon its execution, while the British continued to duck and weave. Wedemeyer wrote before the meeting that it was necessary for the U.S. Chiefs to advance a formula which would “stir the imagination and win the support752 of the Prime Minister, if not that of his recalcitrant planners and chiefs of staff.” Marshall’s biographer Forrest Pogue remarks of Churchill in those days: “As usual, he was full of guile.”753 This seems to misread the prime minister’s behaviour. Opportunism and changeability, rather than studied cunning, guided most of his strategic impulses. Yet there is no period of the war at which American dismay754 about British behaviour seems better merited than autumn 1943, as Eden and others acknowledged. Churchill and his commanders had always professed themselves committed to launching an invasion of Europe in 1944. At the Casablanca and Washington conferences, the British had not argued against Overlord in principle, but merely fought for delay. Now, it seemed, they were altogether reneging.

Churchill opened at Quebec by reasserting principled support for an invasion. But he pressed