Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [228]
After Tehran, Churchill cannot have failed to understand how little Roosevelt cared for Britain, its interests or stature. Not for a moment did the prime minister relax his efforts to flatter and cajole the president. But it became progressively harder for him to address the United States than Russia. With Stalin, Churchill continued to seek bargains, but his expectations were pitched low. The American relationship, however, was fundamental to every operation of war; to feeding the British people; to all prospect of sustaining the empire in the postwar world. It seems extraordinary that some historians have characterised the relationship between Roosevelt and Churchill as a friendship. To be sure, the prime minister embraced the president in speech and correspondence as “my friend.” “Every morning when I wake,”841 he once said, “my first thought is how I can please President Roosevelt.” But much of what FDR served up to Churchill between 1943 and 1945 was gall and wormwood.
From Tehran, while Roosevelt went home to Washington Churchill flew to Cairo. He was tired and indeed ill, yet meetings and dinners crowded in upon one another. He rebuked Mountbatten by signal for demanding the services of 33,700 fighting soldiers to address 5,000 Japanese in the Arakan region of Burma—“the Americans have been taking their islands842 on the basis of two-and-a-half to one. That your Generals should ask for six-and-a-half to one has produced a very bad impression.” He dined at the embassy on December 10 with a party which included Smuts, Eden, Cadogan and Randolph Churchill, then took off at one a.m. for Tunisia. His York landed at the wrong airfield, where Brooke saw him “sitting on his suitcase in a very cold morning wind843, looking like nothing on earth. We were there about an hour before we moved on and he was chilled through by then.”
After another brief flight, they landed again, this time in the right place, and he was driven to Maison Blanche, Eisenhower’s villa near Carthage. On December 11, he slept all day, then dined with Ike, Brooke, Tedder and others. He went to bed in pain from his throat. At four a.m., Brooke was awakened by a plaintive voice crying out “Hulloo, Hulloo, Hulloo.” The CIGS switched on a torch and demanded crossly: “Who the hell is that?” His beam fell upon the prime minister in his dragon dressing gown, a brown bandage around his head, complaining of a headache and searching for his doctor. Next day Churchill had a temperature, and Moran telegraphed for nurses and a pathologist. He was diagnosed with pneumonia.
Through the days which followed, though he continued to see visitors and dispatch a stream of signals, he lay in bed, knowing that he was very ill. “If I die,” he told his daughter Sarah844, “don’t worry—the war is won.” On December 15, he suffered a heart attack. Sarah read Pride and Prejudice aloud to him. News of Churchill’s illness unleashed a surge of sentiment and sympathy among his people. A British soldier in North Africa wrote in his diary: “We all hope and pray845 that he will recover. It would be a great thing if Mr. Churchill will live to see the victorious end to his great fight against the Nazis.” On the afternoon of the seventeenth, Clementine Churchill arrived, escorted by Jock Colville, who had been recalled from the RAF to the Downing Street secretariat. The new antibiotics were doing their work. While the prime minister remained weak, and suffered a further slight heart attack, he no longer seemed in peril of death. On the nineteenth Clementine wrote to her daughter Mary: “Papa much better today846. Has consented not to smoke and to drink only weak whisky and soda.”
He was now fuming about the “scandalous … stagnation” of the Italian campaign, and especially about the failure to use available landing craft to launch an amphibious assault behind the German front. He urged Roosevelt to give swift consideration to British proposals for new command arrangements in the Mediterranean, now that Dwight Eisenhower had been named to direct Overlord.