Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [253]
The best that can be said about Anglo-American relations in 1944—and it is a very important best—is that at the operational level, the two nations’ armed forces worked adequately together. Britain and the United States were the only major belligerents to sustain a real collaboration; Germany and Japan, and the Western Allies and Russia, did not. The men on the spot knew it was vital that it should be so. The Americans liked some senior British officers—Portal, Tedder, Morgan, Montgomery’s chief of staff Freddie de Guingand—even if they found it hard to relate to others such as Brooke. Cunningham, for the Royal Navy, observed that he found it easier to get along with America’s soldiers than with her sailors, above all King, the glowering chief of naval operations. The U.S. admiral never forgave the British for rejecting a request for the loan of an aircraft carrier for Pacific operations at a desperate moment in 1942, after the Americans had several times made their own flattops available to support British purposes in the European theatre. But while it is acknowledged that all alliance relationships are profoundly difficult, there remains much cause for admiration and gratitude for the manner in which the U.S. and British armed forces made common cause between 1942 and 1945. Eisenhower, who privately liked the British a good deal less than his geniality caused them to suppose, deserved much of the credit.
The troubles of the alliance were most conspicuous at its summit. Churchill, speaking of Allied deception plans, famously observed that truth is so precious that it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies. He might have said the same about his relationship with the United States. Benign deceits were indispensable. In May 1942, when criticism of his leadership was at his height, a letter writer to the Times suggested that instead of being prime minister, Churchill should fill “a place that has long been vacant930 in our body politic; it is the post of Public Orator.” The proposal was mischievous, but this was a role which Churchill indeed filled to supreme effect, in conducting Britain’s dealings with the United States. In his speeches between 1940 and 1945, he created a glorious fiction of shared British and American purposes. He never hinted to his own public, still less the transatlantic one, his frustrations and disappointments about the policies of Roosevelt, any more than he did about those of Stalin. Roosevelt, in his turn, largely reciprocated. The key to understanding the wartime Anglo-American relationship is to strip aside the rhetoric of the two leaders and acknowledge that it rested, as relations between states always do, upon perceptions of national interest. There was some genuine sentiment on Churchill’s side, but none on Roosevelt’s.
As D-Day approached, Churchill’s attitude was bewilderingly complex, perhaps even to himself. He thrilled to a historic military operation, the success of which would go far to fulfil every hope he had cherished since 1940. He emphasised to his own people, as well as to the Americans, that Britain was wholeheartedly committed. He took the keenest interest in every detail of the invasion plans, and personally originated the Mulberry artificial harbours which were to be deployed off the Normandy coast. But he never ceased to lament the consequences of the huge commitment to Eisenhower’s campaign for that of Alexander in Italy. He knew that the United States would dominate operations in northwest Europe once the Allies were ashore. The British war effort would attain its apogee on June 6. Thereafter, it must shrink before the sad gaze of its chieftain. At the British Army’s peak strength in Normandy, Montgomery commanded 14 British, 1 Polish and