Harry in England. Chapter Five: "A little touch of Harry in the night."
Hitler and Stalin were preoccupied with America as Harry toured England. Willkie was coming. Beaverbrook suggested an informal meeting with all of England's publishers and editors. Harry agreed.
This Chapter: Lindbergh was leading the opposition to Lend Lease. Wendell Willkie, still carrying the Presidential Virus, said he thought Lend Lease was a good idea with a few changes he had in mind. He said he would go to England to see for himself. Roosevelt encouraged it. Meanwhile, Hitler was telling Mussolini he thought attacking Stalin would be necessary. Stalin had thousands of spies who were telling him thousands of things. He chose to believe Hitler would just bluff an attack to make a deal. In London, Churchill told Beaverbrook to respect Harry and his mission, so Beaverbrook gave him an audience with the influential men of Fleet Street. Harry killed.
Contents of “Harry in England”:
Queen Wilhelmina and Edward R. Murrow
Meeting The VIPs
With Winston
“Even to the end.”
“A little touch of Harry in the night.”
The Good Grind of Hard Work
Willkie comes to London. Not for long, but too long.
Hopkins Reports Details of British Needs
“Lord Root of the Matter.”
Chapter Five: “A little touch of Harry in the night.”
Reading time: Eighteen minutes
As the Prime Minister’s train was returning to London, Charles Lindbergh was testifying in Washington before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on the matter of Lend Lease. His statement made clear his great respect for the German army and his belief that the British had no chance, even with American weapons, to defeat Adolf Hitler. Lend Lease would, he said, “result in a waste of American resources in a war that is not only hopeless, but none of our business.”
“Does this mean,” he was asked, “that you not only expect, but prefer, a German victory?” The temerity of the question was met with boos and hisses from the gallery.
Lindbergh said, “I want neither side to win. I want the British to seek terms with Germany to avoid a defeat that will result in complete prostration in Europe such as we have never seen.” Cheers followed that.
Hearing that, Franklin Roosevelt said to Missy LeHand, “There is no limit to what people will believe if it makes them feel good.” In just two weeks since he had spoken to the American people at their firesides, 91% of them were aware of Lend Lease according to a Gallup Poll, and 61% supported the proposal against only 24% who opposed it. The Roper Poll said that 68% of the people favored aid to Britain “even at the risk of war for the United States.” Roosevelt had moved the people to his view, but the House and the Senate were another matter as, once more, many members remembered that they were elected on promises of keeping America isolated from the troubles of the world.
They opened the debate with charges that the president was asking for the powers of a dictator. In the words of California’s Hiram Johnson — “I decline to change the whole form of my government on the specious plea of assisting one belligerent. It is up to Congress now to determine whether our government shall be as ordained, or become a member of the totalitarian states.” — and Wisconsin’s Philip La Follette who said, “The administration’s only answer to the menace of Hitlerism in Europe is to create Hitlerism step by step in the United States.” The issue was not about arms for Britain, but presidential ambition for unbridled power.
America First moved quickly after Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat, and by the day of Lindbergh’s appearance they had stimulated hundreds of noisy protests from their many chapters, a flood of mail to Congressional offices, and packed galleries that cheered Lindbergh. Roosevelt gave Robert Sherwood the job of mobilizing his supporters as they were fast closing the gap with the Century Group, a progressive New York-based organization fueled with the financial support of Henry Luce and led by Herbert Agar, the Editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal.
The goal of the Century Group was war, the sooner the better. Agar’s testimony on the heels of Lindbergh’s drew a line in the debate. Senator Wheeler asked him if he was, “in fact, asking for an undeclared war against Germany?”
“Certainly not,” said Agar. “I’m working for a declared war against Germany. Today, Lend Lease is the best we can get.”
At his endorsement of Lend Lease — “with several amendments” — Wendell Willkie said he would go to England to see for himself. Looking for more heft up against Lindbergh, Roosevelt invited him to the Oval Office and endorsed the trip. He suggested that Willkie’s insights acquired on the visit would strengthen his Congressional testimony in the debate when he returned. Willkie told Roosevelt his support would require three amendments, one to end the presidential power at a “date certain,” one to give Congress financial control of the generosity, and another to require guarantees that the recipient nations were financially unable to make conventional purchases.
To that, with one of his charming smiles, Roosevelt said, “That’s very interesting.” It was a tactic and a comment that usually left his conversational partner with the belief that the president was all for what he had just heard. Willkie got that impression, mistakenly, because he thought he deserved it. He was a player, someone not to be dismissed. He hadn’t been cured of the Presidential Virus despite his defeat.
He also told the president that Harry Hopkins should be summoned home immediately and fired. Roosevelt went unequivocal on that one. He said, “Let me tell you something about this job of mine, Wendell. Everyone who walks through that door wants something from me, with the single exception of Harry Hopkins. All he wants is to help me with whatever I want. You may sit here one day and if you do, you’ll want nothing more than a man like Harry. He is not merely unselfish, he is the most able executive I have ever known. So thanks for your opinion, but I think I’ll keep him.”
Willkie said he would go to London on his own initiative to maintain the independence of a private citizen. Roosevelt liked that. He would be insulated from anything Willkie might say on the trip, which he thought he might be using to open his second campaign. Traveling as a private citizen to a belligerent nation required State Department approval, and Roosevelt instructed Secretary Cordell Hull to expedite it. He took a sheet of presidential stationery and wrote,“Dear Churchill,
“Wendell Willkie will give you this. He is truly helping to keep politics out over here.”
And added five lines of Longfellow’s famous poem.
“ ‘Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!’
“As ever yours,
Franklin D. Roosevelt”
“I’ll let Churchill know you’re coming,”Roosevelt said to Willkie. “When you meet him, give him this with my regards.”
Harry got the news of the Lend Lease debate, and a cable from the president about Willkie’s forthcoming trip, from Herschel Johnson as he met the train in London. A gaggle of newspapermen was present at the train station and he acceded to their wish to speak with him. He said nothing at all as politely as he could. When he was asked if he would characterize his visit as “urgent,” he said, “Yes. You may use that word.”
He handed off his written reports that Johnson said he would have typed without delay and sent on to the president. He scribbled a note to the boss, asking Johnson to have it sent as a cable. It read, “So pleased Willkie is coming. Between Winston showing me off and the press hounding me, I’m getting too much attention and not enough work done. WW can take the visible position. My weekend to be spent at Chequers with key figures. Then to the grind. May need an extra week or so over here. My opinion to date: If you stand with Churchill and these people, they will not disappoint.”
Harry was uncomfortable with the idea of Willkie coming to England. It wasn’t jealousy. He really could benefit from a prominent American on hand to draw the attention away from him, but … but nothing. It was the president’s call.
*
During Harry’s second weekend, his first at Chequers, Hitler said to Mussolini at a meeting on his Berchtesgaden mountaintop, “I don’t see great danger coming from America even if she should enter the war.” The Duce’s tail was limp from failures in Greece and Egypt. He had come expecting to receive one of the blistering attacks he had so often seen Hitler deliver to others, but he was met by the Führer at the train station at Puch, greeted cordially, fed well, and smiled upon, so maybe not.
Hitler stood in his office in the Berghof before the window that exposed Austria that he had swallowed three years before, a window so large and heavy that a dedicated motor was necessary for opening it to summer breezes, or for enabling its cleaning. He said, “The much greater danger is the gigantic block of Russia. Through we have very favorable political and economic agreements with Russia, I prefer to rely on other powerful means at my disposal for meeting that challenge.”
He didn’t tell Mussolini the details of what he had in mind with his powerful means, but the Duce hadn’t been in Tahiti. Hitler did let him in on his singular insights of the global balance of power, and his grand strategy for its mastery. Mussolini was relieved. He now thought his purpose was to listen admiringly. He could do that.
Hitler had a new enemy, and it wasn’t America. It was time. He was slowly losing the arms race to newer weapons that would make his own vast arsenal vulnerable. And the next winter would find him in Russia. When it came, he had to be in full command of Stalin’s forces, and not fighting both the Soviet army and the cold that had crippled Napoleon. That required opening the attack as soon as possible.
Hitler said, “The winter has been unsatisfactory from a purely military view, but it has brought me time to contemplate larger matters.”
Hitler told the Duce of the German-Soviet Border and Commercial Agreement, recently signed, that would bring millions of tons of grain and oil from Russia to the Reich in an exchange for machine tools and arms-manufacturing equipment whose “deliveries would begin in July.” That made him cackle. He didn’t mention that the agreement had been made necessary by Stalin’s shutting off deliveries for slow pay, but he hinted at it by saying, “The man is no more than a clerk. And a blackmailer to boot.”
He spoke of the power of the Tripartite Pact, which Hungary and Rumania were poised to join as compliant junior partners, and as Bulgaria would also become one day soon. “Our relationship with Japan is the key. Stalin has extended an offer to join the Pact under absurd conditions. We are reviewing it, and it will take some time.” He flashed an evil smile of conspiratorial overtones. “When we take the action that history requires — demands! — the issue will become moot and Japan will have the opportunity to turn from a Russia facing larger complications, and immensely complicate the life of Roosevelt in the Pacific.
“The American advantage is their transcontinentality, a reach to two oceans, but it also is their disadvantage. The British advantage is its Empire and their Navy that makes it possible, but our submarine attacks on their convoys are bringing them slowly to their knees. Our options are three. The first is increased air and ground strikes against peripheral targets in the Balkans, the Near East, and in the Mediterranean to punish Britain for declining our offers of accommodation. But this would be painfully slow and means continuing our toleration of Stalin’s blackmailing. The second is to link with Russia in a way that will give Europe and Asia equivalent transcontinentality. But this would place us in a dependence on Russia that would be not unlike what is now happening with England and America. Moreover, it is untrustworthy in execution and historically undesirable for its failure to meet the need for the absolute eradication of Judeo-Bolshevism. The third is the one we will choose in combination with Japanese challenges to America in the Pacific.”
His ambition for “absolute eradication” had become attainable with the recent mass departures of foreign correspondents from all of Europe. It gave him the opportunity of dealing with the Jews in ways that would benefit from being unobserved.
Mussolini had no doubt what the third option was, or what it meant, in particular to him. He said, “You have often spoken, we have spoken, of the difficulties of waging war on two fronts. Does this no longer trouble you?”
“There is no front in our war on England. We are strangling them while their response is insignificant, merely irritating. If America should enter the conflict on the British side, then we would see an actual front, so we must eliminate the Russian problem before that may occur. I think it likely, in fact, that our conquest of the Soviets will cause the Americans to turn away from Europe and deal only with their Pacific issues.”
“Do you consider the possibility that Russia may attack us first?”
“Stalin would never do that. He’s too cautious, too reasonable.”
Benito Mussolini had a sudden sense that he was in the company of a madman who would one day bring on his own violent death, though incidentally.
*
Stalin had only three items in greater supply than the other global powers. One was land mass. Another was soldiers. He had four million in uniform and another four million coming soon in a huge conscription, but they were untrained, many even part-time, workers in his factories and peasants from the farms, and the army they formed suffered from a scarcity of officers of all ranks, especially generals. Still, eight million men was a lot of protoplasm.
The third was spies. He had more than three thousand of them, and he was learning that was way too many. They had come to him as frightened Russians seeking haven from his purges, as revenge-seeking survivors of German conquests, and as ideologues, or cowards, from here and there, committed to Communism, or their survival. They produced hundreds of thousands of rumors, conversations, and intercepts, overwhelming the Kremlin’s cryptographic capacity for translation, deciphering, and processing systematically into meaningful information. Stalin wanted to see it all, but had to settle for those he could find the time to read, so he was presented with a warped perspective, or none at all.
The ideologues of espionage included five men highly placed in Churchill’s government. They were Anthony Blunt (Code Name “Tony”) in counterintelligence at MI5, Guy Burgess (“Mädchen,” meaning Girl) in the secret service of MI6, Donald Maclean (“Homer”) in the Foreign Office, Kim Philby (“Söhnchen,” meaning Son) in sabotage training at the Special Operations Executive, and John Cairncross (“Liszt”) the personal secretary of Minister Without Portfolio Maurice Hankey. Liszt alone had passed on 3,349 classified documents in the first year of his service to the Kremlin. Söhnchen reported that the British were not training undercover agents for work in the USSR, news that Stalin found so ridiculous that he suspected all his spies in Britain were double agents.
He had sixty-five spies in various ministries in Germany, more than he thought reasonable in that rigid totalitarian state, but he didn’t know which, if any, were telling him the truth, a word that soon lost meaning. Hitler became obsessed with secrecy, or the lack of it, and mounted a counterintelligence operation of his own that spread scores of contradictory rumors as explanations for his intentions, and his troop movements that were impossible to disguise.
The noise of it all left Stalin with the belief that Hitler would likely follow the pattern he had used in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland of massing troops on the border and then demanding surrender, or negotiations that would have the same result. His expectation was that the Führer would do that at the Ukraine border.
Stalin especially liked the report he had from his spy Orests Berlings (“Lycée-ist,” meaning Perpetual High Schooler). He was a Latvian newspaper reporter now in Berlin, reporting that Hitler had made clear to his high command that an attack on Russia while he was still dealing with Britain was “impossible, suicidal.” Lycée-ist was, however, an actual double agent.
Lavrenti Beria, who headed Russia’s civilian intelligence gathering at the NKVD, did his best to persuade his boss of the credibility of a report from his most trusted agent, Rudolf von Schelifa (“Aryan”), the chargé d’affaires to the Polish Ambassador. Aryan reported that the German attack would come in May along three linear axes aimed at Leningrad, Moscow, and Stalingrad. Filipp Golikov, who headed Soviet military intelligence, had similar reports, but he presented them with less certainty than Beria. Stalin brushed them off. After all, each of Golikov’s five predecessors in the job had been executed.
He was suffering from a bias for information that confirmed what he already believed. Hitler wasn’t crazy, he thought. He was just doing business.
*
Winston had Beaverbrook to Chequers for dinner, once again, that weekend. He instructed him to dismount from his high horse. “Max, Harry Hopkins is a good man and we need him. We would likely all be dead if it were not for you, but we’re alive and this man can keep us alive. And he wants to. Show him the respect he deserves.”
“Prime Minister,” Beaverbrook said, going respectful, “I actually like him. I think he has steel.”
“Steel? Hell, man, everyone on the island has steel! He has weapons!”
“But how many?”
“More than we have!”
The Beaver took his instructions to heart. Before dinner, he told Harry he understood the difficulty he was facing with the bothersome reporters and suggested an alternative. “I would like to gather all the publishers and editors of Fleet Street to a dinner and have you as our guest. No speech unless you think otherwise. Just a lot of good talk.”
Harry said, “Well, Max, that’s very good of you. Did the boss take you out to the woodshed?”
“Point to you.”
“Can you provide me with a guest list, including the political perspectives of each of the newspapers?”
“I can. And I’ll sort of shepherd you along as you meet them.”
The Fleet Street gathering took place at Claridge’s on Tuesday. Beaverbrook wanted it off the record and unreported, but over objections to that, with Harry’s acquiescence, the guests settled on, by lot, giving Percy Cudlipp, the editor of the Daily Herald, a limited exclusive. Cudlipp wrote:
“We were all tired men, suffering from a succession of long nights during which London had been bombed and during which the difficulties of newspaper production had been extreme. But on that midwinter evening we were also intensely curious men, wondering as our cars advanced cautiously through the blackout to Claridge’s what Hopkins would have to say to us. He had said so little since he arrived in London. Our reporters were obliged to record that he ‘smiled quizzically’ in answer to their questions. He said not much more than he was here to ‘discuss matters of mutual interest to our two countries.’ Under persistence, he admitted they were ‘urgent matters.’
“The gathering included editors, leading writers, proprietors, and managers. The provincial press was also represented. When the waiters had cleared the tables the doors were closed and Beaverbrook addressed us, and Hopkins. He said Hopkins had been talking to members of the government, but this occasion was more important because we were ‘masters of the government,’ the leaders of the British press. He invited Mr. Hopkins to speak, but emphasized that he would visit with us at our tables afterwards and, therefore, might limit his remarks from the dais.
“Hopkins rose, looking lean, shy, and untidy, grasping the back of his chair. His words were private so no notes were taken. He talked in intimate terms. Where the President had spoken of America’s duty to the world two days earlier when he was sworn in for his third term, Hopkins told us how the President and those around him were convinced that America’s world duty could be successfully performed only in partnership with Britain. He told us of the anxiety and admiration with which every phase of Britain’s lonely struggle was watched from the White House, and of his own emotions as he travelled through our blitzed land. His speech left us with the feeling that although America was not yet in the war, she was marching beside us, and that should we stumble she would see we did not fall. Above all, he convinced us that the President and the men around him blazed with faith in the future of Democracy.
“He went on a slow journey around the room, pulling up a chair alongside the editors and managers and talking to them individually. He astonished us all, Right, Left, and Centre, by his grasp of our newspapers’ separate policies and problems.
“We went away content — Hopkins to bed; Beaverbrook to his desk at the Ministry of Aircraft Production to read the night’s reports and prepare orders for his factory managers on the morrow; the rest of us to our offices to find that production had gone forward well in the evening blessedly free from the crash of bombs or the smell of burning buildings.
“Many a tragic and terrible chapter may be added to our country’s history before our prayers are answered and our efforts rewarded. None of us who had been listening to the man from the White House was in any illusion about the peril which encompasses our island. But we were happy men all; our confidence and our courage had been stimulated by a contact for which Shakespeare, in ‘Henry V,’ had a phrase: ‘A little touch of Harry in the night.’ ”
Cudlipp’s front-page post the next day sold out, even made its way to Aubrey Morgan’s desk in New York. He cabled Harry at the embassy, “That’s public relations!”