Part 14

A. I am sure he has a profound admiration for Mr. Roosevelt quite aside from the help he wants from him. Churchill and Roosevelt are both aristocrats, both expert politicians, both highly cultured men, both believers in humanity, and in the destiny of the English-speaking peoples. There are only two factors to make them differ. The first is that they are rivals, friendly rivals, of course, and allied rivals for the duration of the war, but rivals just the same, and when the time comes to translate victory into peace terms it is going to be exciting to see which of these powerful, determined men will do the leading. It will be a struggle of titans. As one reviews the chief characteristics of each man it seems as though each possesses to the ultimate possible degree the qualities of courage, intelligence, imagination, and stubbornness.

Churchill has called Roosevelt “this great man, this thrice chosen head of a nation of 130,000,000.” Another time in 1934 he described Roosevelt’s administration as a dictatorship, writing: “Although the Dictatorship is veiled by constitutional forms it is none the less effective.” Hastily he added: “To compare Roosevelt’s effort with that of Hitler is not to insult Roosevelt but civilization.” Now both men have become dictators in the classical sense of the word as it has been so sapiently defined by Frederick L. Schuman. “‘Dictatorship’ is a form of power which is resorted to voluntarily and temporarily by democracies to meet dangers of invasion or revolution. It is a device to save democracy, not to destroy it.... The disposition of democrats to regard dictatorship in times of crisis as fatal to democracy rather than as fundamental to its preservation reflects a tragic confusion resting upon ignorance of history and misuse of labels.” Schuman points out that Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini are tyrants or despots, but not, if one uses the word properly, “dictators.”

The reassuring fact is that both Roosevelt and Churchill believe that a Pax Anglo-Americana is the key to the future. Churchill believes that the British ought to take the leading role in such an arrangement because they have borne the heat of battle to a greater degree than we shall have done even with our troops in Europe. Roosevelt believes America ought to be the leader since we are coming out of the war considerably stronger than Great Britain and the younger nation is now ready to take over guidance of world affairs from the parent country. Out of this fundamental difference could come a massive dispute, but since it will have been based on victory we can hope fervently that the opportunity for the discussion be provided as quickly as possible.

Churchill has a second difference with Roosevelt in the field of economic theory and practice. He is distinctly against the New Deal. There was a time during the period of the Blue Eagle when Churchill seemed almost to fear that communism was coming to the United States. He warned: “It is irrational to tear down or cripple the capitalist system without having the fortitude of spirit and ruthlessness of

## action to create a new communist system.” With Churchillian directness

he proclaims his belief in profits. “There can never be good wages or good employment for any length of time without good profits.”

With equal candor and with much wit he defends rich men. “A second danger to President Roosevelt’s valiant and heroic experiments seems to arise from the disposition to hunt down rich men as if they were noxious beasts.... It is a very attractive sport, and once it gets started quite a lot of people everywhere are found ready to join in the chase.... The question arises whether the general well-being of the masses of the community will be advanced by an excessive indulgence in this amusement. The millionaire or multi-millionaire is a highly economic animal. He sucks up with sponge-like efficiency money from all quarters. In this process, far from depriving ordinary people of their earnings, he launches enterprise and carries it through, raises values, and he expands that credit without which on a vast scale no fuller economic life can be opened to the millions. To hunt wealth is not to capture commonwealth.” All this, his own economic philosophy, he sums up in the formula: “Whether it is better to have equality at the price of poverty or well-being at the price of inequality.”

Does this indicate a narrowly selfish interest by Churchill in his own class? Not at all. He believes profoundly in the possibility of extending leisure and well-being to all mankind through the benefits of science. He takes the evidence of Soviet Russia that the means to general affluence is not communism, nor does he think it can come through any form of nationalization of production. He believes the essence of the problem is monetary. He believes the rights of man are more important than the success of any economic system. He believes in the British Empire as a mighty instrument of civilization. He believes profoundly in cooperation with us. There is no reason why the two mightiest democratic dictators, Roosevelt and Churchill, should not emerge from the Peace Conference with a harmonious plan.

Q. _Is it true that Churchill is gifted with a peculiar power to foresee the event?_

A. I know of no statement which summed up in so few words a complete forecast of history as was contained in one sentence of Churchill’s delivered April 6, 1936 in a speech on the fortification of the Rhineland. You will remember that Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland March 6, 1936. Mr. Churchill had this to say: “The creation of a line of forts opposite to the French frontier will enable the German troops to be economized on that line and will enable the main forces to swing round through Belgium and Holland.” There in thirty-six words you have the entire story of the Battle of France, told four years before it took place.

Q. _Tell us what you know of Mr. Churchill as a person. What are his principal characteristics?_

A. Courage is his principal characteristic. I hesitated a moment but decided to put his courage ahead of his intelligence, because courage is a more important quality than intelligence. I remember I once had a spirited argument on this point with Henri Bernstein, the French playwright. We were at the country home of Louis Bromfield in Senlis, the point outside Paris where the Germans during the last war came nearest to the capital. Bernstein insisted intelligence was the most valuable quality a man could have, and with enough of it he would not need more than a minimum of courage. I argued that without courage the keenest intelligence is useless in a world of action. A couple of years later Bernstein and I were on the same refugee ship, the _Madura_ of the British India Line, fleeing from Bordeaux to England after the fall of France. I reminded Bernstein of our argument and insisted that the disaster of France proved my contention was right. Surely the French were still what they have often been called, the most intelligent people on the continent, but for some reason which nobody has yet completely fathomed, they had at this moment of their national history lost the desire or the willingness to fight. I suppose it would be fair to define that as lack of courage, although I would be the last to assert that this is a permanent state of mind or of heart on the part of the French.

The collapse of the French was the signal for Churchill to display the finest quality of his character. Senator Gerald P. Nye once, with the good taste characteristic of our isolationists, said: “Britain is a dead horse. America should not team up with a lost cause.” To France in her death agony Churchill made the offer that she merge with Britain and establish a single Franco-British government and cabinet, unite the resources of the French and British Empires, and fight on to the last drop of British blood, even if all France were occupied. It took a Churchill’s imagination, generosity, and audacity to make such an offer. The French did not have enough strength left to reach out and accept the hand of rescue. We have heard a great deal about fighting to the last drop of blood, but Churchill is the only man I have ever seen among the belligerents who makes it absolutely convincing.

I was in London during those peak months of the Battle of Britain, August and September 1940 when the Germans were bombing by day as well as by night, trying to conquer the R.A.F. to make invasion possible. One day I was driving through London with Mr. Churchill, and as we passed a particularly large and well-camouflaged machine-gun emplacement at a street intersection, the Prime Minister called my attention to it. “Do you see that?” “Yes,” I said, “it seems you really meant it when you said the British would fight in the streets.” “Meant it!” exclaimed Mr. Churchill. “Why the Germans could if they liked drop a hundred thousand parachutists on London, and if they did we would chew them up and spit them out.” There was in his voice a note of delight at the prospect. This note is present in all of Churchill’s references to getting at the enemy. Although no man would act more quickly to relieve his people of the necessity of shedding their blood, while the fight is on Churchill revels in it. The responsibilities which are his now must be greater than those carried by any other human being on earth. One would think such a weight would have a crushing effect upon him. Not at all. The last time I saw him, while the Battle of Britain was still raging, he looked twenty years younger than before the war began. As we walked across the garden in the rear of Number Ten Downing Street I had to quicken my pace and almost trot to keep up with him, so swiftly did he stride along the gravel path.

His uplifted spirit is transmitted to the people and it is my impression that the British are, just as Churchill said, “proud to be under the fire of the enemy.” You may think it overdrawn but if you had shared with them the experience of heavy air bombardment, you would agree that Churchill was only expressing the exact truth when he said: “The sublime but also terrible experience and emotions of the battlefield which for centuries have been reserved for soldiers and sailors now are shared for good or ill by the entire population.” Even in the midst of the most fearful danger Churchill taunts the enemy--“We are waiting for that long promised invasion. So are the fishes.” I would not be surprised if Churchill really wanted the Germans to try, for if they were to try and fail it would be a defeat so disastrous that it might well lead to a German collapse.

Without courage nothing can be accomplished. With it plus intelligence everything can be done. Churchill’s courage is of every variety. He has the simple battle courage of the Hussar. Remember the cavalry charge at Omdurman in the Sudan when the young Lieutenant Churchill fought his way through a tangle of howling dervishes? He has the enduring physical courage to play a championship game of polo with a dislocated shoulder. He has the moral courage to lead a lost cause. It was he who defended the Duke of Windsor at the abdication, when the once most popular man in the British Empire had lost every other friend. He has the courage to take responsibility, and since he has been Prime Minister he has personally taken the criticism for every ill turn of fortune, every plan gone wrong. He can meet a hostile mob and talk it down. He can lead in battle. He can lead in war. Above all he can infuse his courage into others.

One’s pulse quickens at that immortal peroration of his delivered on June 18, 1940, when France had surrendered, the British Expeditionary Force had escaped with the loss of all its tools, and England stood weaponless before the foe, in greater mortal peril than ever in ten centuries. The words Churchill spoke then were the equivalent of a strong army to defend the British Isles. Translated into the deeds of the R.A.F., they defeated the enemy. Churchill said: “What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned upon us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister and perhaps more prolonged by the lights of a perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say ‘This was their finest hour.’”

Q. _What was it Churchill said about carrying on even if the British Isles were conquered?_

A. On August 20, 1940 in the midst of the Battle of Britain, Churchill said: “If we had been put in the terrible position of France, a contingency now happily impossible, although, of course, it would have been the duty of all war leaders to fight on here to the end, it would also have been their duty, as I indicated in my speech of June 4, to provide as far as possible for the Naval security of Canada and our Dominions and to make sure they had the means to carry on the struggle from beyond the oceans.”

Q. _That would be fine for us if we could depend upon it, but do you think Churchill really meant it? What good would it do for the British Navy to carry on if the British Isles were conquered?_

A. I am sure that Churchill himself would do exactly as he said he would. He would perish with his troops or with his Navy--who can tell how or where--but he would never surrender. Can you doubt it when you hear those words of his which are as much an inspiration for us today as they were for the British when he uttered them on the last day of the evacuation of Dunkirk? They deserve to be memorized by us all. “Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas, and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”

With Churchill’s picture these words are placarded in homes and offices throughout the British Empire. Their spirit is the spirit of Britain. But having said this I am compelled to add that it would be feeble-minded for us to expect that the British Navy would continue resistance to the Germans after the British Isles had been conquered.

Let us examine what the position would be if the British Isles fell. First let us ask a British Naval Officer what would happen to the Royal Navy if the British Isles were conquered. He will tell you: “There wouldn’t be any Navy left.” I can see readily how this would be true. If the Germans try invasion, the Royal Navy is going to throw itself between the home island and the invaders with a desperation such as has never been equaled in British Naval history, and that is saying a very great deal. The Germans cannot capture the British Isles by air power alone. They can land men and machine guns by air as they did at Crete, but the heavy weapons they need to beat off and batter down the formidable British artillery and heavy tanks now massed at home, they will have to land by sea. Without these weapons they cannot win. The Royal Navy will prevent their landing or perish in the attempt. The Germans will try to clear the way for their invading craft by torpedoes, mines, speedboats, Stukas, burning oil on the water, and every conceivable means, and by some perhaps not now conceivable to us. The British defenders will discard caution and risk everything. They will hurl themselves at the invader. If they lose there will surely be little left of the Navy.

But suppose there were left a British naval force large enough when taken in combination with what we could spare from the Pacific to continue to maintain practical control of the Atlantic, enough anyway to prevent any German attempt at sending an invading army to America. Could we then expect this remnant of the British Navy to retire to Canada or the United States, and continue resistance to the Germans? I do not think so.

In the first place, what would be the purpose of the British Navy in continuing resistance to the Germans after the British Isles had been captured? Would it be for the purpose of eventually reconquering the British Isles? No, because that would be impossible. This is one of those grim facts which are too ugly for most people to look at, but there is no use turning our eyes away and refusing to see that if the Germans do invade and conquer the British Isles, the British people will have finished their life. It would be the end for them, not for the duration of this war, which would in fact be ended then, but for as far into the future as the imagination can travel. The Germans might remain in possession of the British Isles or in effective control for the thousand years Hitler so often boasts about, or until they became weak through centuries of good living. Hitler would disarm the people of Britain and allow hunger to decimate them. He could count on forty per cent of the population dying of starvation in a year or so. Does this seem an exaggeration? It is only one more of those facts about Hitler which nobody would believe. The trusting Dutch would not believe what Hitler was like until he taught the people of Rotterdam. But the British people have now learned their lesson. They have totally lost the wide-eyed faith of our Lindberghs, that Hitler is “human after all.” The British know Hitler would do just what I have said, he would deliberately destroy a great part of the population, allowing to remain alive only those sufficiently broken to become good slaves. But why, you ask, could not the British Navy reconquer the British Isles, if they had our wholehearted help? The answer is that there would be no base from which to operate.

We can now contemplate reconquering Europe from the Nazis because we have a base or several possible bases from which to operate against the Reich. We have the British Isles and Russia and the Middle East, and parts of North Africa, and may have other bases before the war is over. But if the British Isles were captured, where could the British Navy land to invade and repossess them? And with what troops would this engagement be fought? With the Canadians and Australians? Nobody would dare disparage the fighting qualities of these magnificent men, but if the 46,000,000 Britishers in the British Isles had failed to throw back the German Army is it likely that 16,000,000 Canadians and Australians could defeat it? What about the United States? If we had not entered the war before the conquest of the British Isles, is it likely we would go to war after the British had been beaten? Moreover, if we did, it is inconceivable that we should beat the Germans after they had seized the resources of the United Kingdom. They would then have added to the shipbuilding capacity of the continent all the British shipyards, at this moment the most productive in the world. It might be worth our while to glance an instant at the shipbuilding situation which would exist if Germany takes the British Isles.

The shipbuilding capacity of each of the following countries is listed as of the most productive year since 1917. This was usually 1919.

_Tons_ Germany 600,000 Denmark 140,000 France 210,000 Holland 240,000 Norway 60,000 Sweden 165,000 Italy 220,000 Japan 700,000 --------- 2,335,000 United Kingdom 2,000,000 --------- Total 4,335,000

After the defeat of Britain, Germany and her allies would possess the capacity to build 4,335,000 tons of ships a year, which is more than four times our 1941 production of around 1,000,000 tons and is even larger than our record performance in 1919 when we turned out 4,075,000 tons of ships. Admiral Land’s prediction that we would eventually build 6,000,000 tons a year remains to be fulfilled. As matters now stand if the Germans were to capture Britain, time would be on their side for the building of ships. Furthermore, of course, the Germans would inherit the vast British industrial machine, and save for the production of steel, would have the power to turn out more airplanes and munitions than we could for many years. All of this is merely to emphasize what the fall of Britain and the end of the British Navy as a fighting force against Hitler would mean to the United States.

Q. _But isn’t Churchill often wrong in his military judgment? Hasn’t he made mistakes due to overconfidence?_

A. It is true that Mr. Churchill has the vices of his virtues, and since his most prominent virtue is courage, he also possesses what has seemed at times to be recklessness. His sanguine temperament makes him ideally equipped to lead a nation in desperate circumstances, but his critics of whom a few still exist will never cease insisting on the obvious, that he makes mistakes, as though it were not the hoariest of adages that only the man who never does anything commits no errors. They list a roll of his alleged military failures, beginning with his unsuccessful defense of Antwerp and the costly attempt to take the Dardanelles in the last war; and in this war Norway, Greece, and Crete. But if these events are analyzed it will be seen that each of them had its justification.