To The Rescue! Chapter Two: "Britain's Broke!"

Göring's bombs had lessened, but not entirely. England was dying as much from starvation as bombs as its merchant ships were sunk by U-Boats. But worse, the nation was broke, nearly penniless.

This Episode: Roosevelt tidied up a few loose ends, including Joe Kennedy, and considered the world around him on a Caribbean cruise. Churchill couldn’t wait and sent the letter that jolted the president from his ruminations, convincing him that he had to intervene immediately for America’s interests as much as England’s. The result was Lend Lease, the authority to send weapons on credit, but not troops, to any nation he believed was fighting a war that America needed them to win. He decided to send Harry Hopkins to London to take the British pulse.

This Chapter: It was clear to Churchill that without America’s vigorous intervention England could not survive. The people were resolute despite 30,000 dying by Luftwaffe bombs, but Nazi U-Boats had sunk 500 British merchant vessels carrying food from America bought with cash-and-carry and now the nation was broke and on the verge of starvation. He brought his popular and clever Ambassador to America to London to prepare their last ditch plea to Roosevelt that would, could, save them if only Roosevelt got the message and responded without delay. A seaplane would deliver the plea to the president who was worrying about the crisis while fishing on a cruiser in the Caribbean.

Contents of “To The Rescue”

1. “Whose bombs are these which fall?”

2. “Britain’s Broke!”

3. Bill Shirer Escapes

4. Knot

5. The Qattara Depression

6. “Burn London to ashes!”

7. The Arsenal of Democracy

Chapter Two: “Britain’s Broke!”

Reading time: twenty-three minutes

On the first Saturday of November, the second day of the month, a strange thing fell on England. Nothing. Silence. Not a bomb. It was the first such day — night actually, as daylight raids had ended several weeks earlier — since the Blitz opened fifty-seven days before on September 7^th. It prompted much speculation, but no answers. The next day the attacks resumed as though Saturday had been no more than a day off. And maybe it was. If wars were officiated, a timeout surely would have been called long ago.

Neville Chamberlain died that week. Churchill eulogized him in Parliament saying “He loved peace, toiled for peace, pursued peace even at great peril and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour. His reputation, once it is brought into resolution by the flickering lamp of history, will be shielded by the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. At the end, he was to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man.”

Clementine told him she was proud of his words. He said, “Of course, I could have done it the other way round.”

“No, you could not have. You are not capable of speaking unkindly about the dead. It isn’t in your nature.”

“If that’s what you think, just wait until I’ve killed Adolf Hitler.”

He cried at Chamberlain’s funeral.

London was no longer the only Luftwaffe target. Birmingham, Bristol, Canterbury, Sheffield, Manchester, Oxford, and Southampton had taken their shares, and Coventry three times. The counting of the dead was a special trial as the number was woefully unsettled. Throughout England, it was estimated that 30,000 were dead. In London alone, it was beyond 10,000, perhaps 15,000, mostly civilians, and as many as 2,500 were children.

There were estimates that one hundred bombs were dropped in each minute of each attack. Recent speculation said that the volume appeared to be lessening. Churchill and Brendan Bracken listened to a BBC broadcast that said, “Casualties were somewhat lighter last night.”

Bracken said, “Tell that to the ones who got killed.”

There were two available types of hiding from bombs: bunkers and shelters. And the former were infinitely superior. In the third week of the bombings, Churchill had abandoned the kindling of Ten Downing Street for a sprawling building two blocks to the south that had been configured for just such a purpose. It was stone — wide, squat, bland, steel-shuttered, and concrete-reinforced — with a sign declaring it to be the Central Statistical Office. It was, in truth, the Number Ten Annexe, the more secure facility for the scores of offices and the living quarters required by the Prime Minister. Under attack, the principal occupants could descend to a much smaller and even more secure underground bunker called the Cabinet War Room, or the Hole.

But it was feared the Annexe could not survive a direct hit, so Churchill was persuaded to take his evenings and his slumber in Down Street on the other side of St. James Park in a bunker buried eighty feet below Piccadilly. Called the Down Street Underground, it had been built two years earlier by the prescient London Transport Executive, and was comfortably arrayed and outfitted with food and drink fit for a Prime Minister with Winston’s appetites. He called it the Burrow. But it lacked a view of the action above, and Winston was drawn to the fireworks like a moth to the flame. So, typically, after dinner he would commandeer his armored car and be taken to the Annexe roof to watch. He learned to count the seconds from the sight of an explosion to the arrival of its sound and entertained himself by estimating the nearness of the miss. Forty years earlier he had written of his mounted charge at Omdurman, “There is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result.” Each night of the autumn of 1940 he showed that the expression was more than a literary conceit.

Göring’s targeting had improved to the extent that the grounds around the PM’s exposed retreat of Chequers were getting badly bomb-scarred. By the middle of November, Winston had capitulated to the pleas of his protective squad to accept the invitation of Nancy and Ronnie Tree to occupy the greater security of their nearby forested estate of Ditchley for his weekends.

He was bunkered. His people were merely sheltered, and not all of them by any means. A good number — 25,000 — had picked up and gone to the countrysides, but it was a small percentage. A substantial number, measured that month by the Gallup Poll to be a majority of London residents, simply stayed in their homes, pulling the blankets up around their chins.

The rest sought shelter night after night in public places that became theirs by virtue of squatters rights. They ghettoized themselves — Jews, Irish, Indians, Cockneys, West Indian Negroes — in corners and crannies of their own, using buckets for toilets and stepping carefully around the detritus of their nocturnal lives. They were polite and deferential of each other, and while there were policemen on hand they were seldom required to bring order. It was as though there was quite enough hell falling from on high to make any other disturbances superfluous. Each morning as they emerged, if they discovered that the house they had left the night before was no longer livable, nor even there, they simply returned to the shelter and made it their new home.

Ed Murrow broadcast each night from the BBC roof and was steadily surprised at the flags that went up when the morning came. “I have seen many flags flying from staffs. No one told these people to put out the flag. They simply feel like flying the Union Jack above their roof. No flag that I have seen has been white.”

But Winston knew, everyone knew, that grit and patriotism had human limits. He was hurting the Luftwaffe. Since their first plane had arrived in July, British defenses had taken 1,300 German aircraft from the sky and killed or captured 2,400 German airmen. It would be empty comfort, however, if the island nation were starved by U-boats strangling the arrival of comestible supplies in the holds of merchant shipping.

Britain had lost five hundred ships of the merchant fleet since the war was declared. In tonnage, it amounted to more than ten percent of the prewar fleet, and it was getting worse by the day. In September and October of 1940, more tonnage was lost to U-boats than was being replaced in current production. The nation needed the monthly importation of 1.2 million tons of foodstuffs to survive, and in October, for the first time, they had failed to receive it. November looked to be no better. The deficit led to rationing, which led to famine.

British cash reserves were disappearing fast, but even the money they had was of restricted use in cash-and-carry purchases from America because of the dual complications of America’s agonizingly slow production schedules and carrying them home through submarine attacks.

Of Roosevelt’s fifty destroyers promised in September, only ten had arrived by the first of November, and half of those were not combat ready. They were all so old as to be “flush-deckers,” lacking the elevated foredeck, the forecastle that made forward guns useful at top speed, so they were of no use on convoy escort duty and suitable only for coastal defense, where they were vulnerable to dive-bombers.

Churchill was fed up. The slow exchange of inadequate, ancient destroyers for bases that the Americans were now using to protect themselves, to England’s neglect, was enough, but his orders for modern rifles, B-17 bombers, and ammunition were not being filled. America was still working single-shifts in its production facilities, and most of the output was being kept for themselves.

He cabled his American ambassador — Philip Kerr, the Marquess of Lothian — asking, “What is being done about our twenty torpedo-boats, the five PBY patrol bombers, the two hundred aircraft, and two hundred thousand rifles?”

Lothian responded, “Prime Minister, the Attorney General, Robert Jackson, and the head of the army, George Marshall, are the leaders of the roadblocking advisors, arguing that America’s own needs must have priority. I was told that only one B-17 is on the way and that the torpedo boats will be released in January.”

Winston told his War Cabinet, “I should tell Roosevelt that if he wants to watch us fighting for his liberties, he will have to pay for the performance. We are putting close to one-half of our national output into fighting the Nazis while the Americans are providing less than five percent of theirs. And very little of that is coming here to join the battle.”

*

Roosevelt was politically secure, though that was a narrow perch and no place to rest. He was preoccupied with England’s dilemma, and how he could help them as both their food and money were running out. He had a warm telegram from Churchill congratulating him on his reëlection that he chose to answer, in part, by having the State Department get the word to Franco in Spain, whose people were starving, that any advance he might make toward Gibraltar would result in a cessation of foodstuff deliveries from America, and something similar to Laval and Pétain in southern France if they were considering taking their Vichy forces into the war against Britain. News of these two potential incursions had come to the president and the prime minister by way of British interceptions of messages the Germans thought were protected by the magic of their Enigma encryption machine. Leaks abounded.

Other communication processes, usually routine, failed the two democracies that month as important principals were not at their posts. When Kennedy called Roosevelt to congratulate him, the president suggested that the ambassador’s letter of resignation would be accepted. Kennedy was fine with that. He told Roosevelt he had no intention of returning to England for so much as to claim his dry cleaning. This left the American embassy’s chargé d’affaires Herschel Johnson to make certain Roosevelt’s responses to Spain and Vichy France were delivered in Britain with their full import, but the task was beyond the brief of a mere chargé, even the able Johnson. Lothian, who had a great instinct for the temperament of the American people, and of their president, was in England for two weeks to help Winston with breaking the logjam by shaping the desperate message America must now hear from England. Two embassies empty of ambassadors may not have been entirely responsible for Roosevelt’s faux pas as he forgot, or someone did, to actually answer Churchill’s congratulatory telegram. But it got the blame months later for bringing unhelpful and unnecessary concern to the man who could endure anything but rejection by Roosevelt.

*

Lothian was sent to his post in America by Chamberlain and Halifax the year before, just as Hitler invaded Poland. There was much in his résumé to recommend his choice, not least his decade-long affinity with appeasement. But there were a few things that belied his credentials as an appeaser, and as a man born to both the manor and the manner.

In his first career step Philip Kerr was sent to work in the South African government, and there discovered much to be admired about the trouble-making Mohandas Gandhi. Kerr was part of the peace process after the Great War and became outspoken about its terms, especially the vengefulness and the fear the French clearly harbored for the Germans. Kerr became an Americanophile in those years. He wrote, “There has been placed in a special way upon the shoulders of the English-speaking nations in this century, the task of helping mankind to draw up and establish that just world constitution without which it can have neither lasting peace, freedom, nor opportunity. No other peoples seem so well situated to take the lead … and it seems to me that America, with its high ideals, its great traditions, its immense strength, is inevitably marked out to take a leading part in this work.” That didn’t go down well with the old boy network in England who thought international leadership was their unique responsibility, and one the Americans were unsuited for because they were so hopelessly uncivilized.

Then, in a search for greater meaning, Kerr abandoned Catholicism, rooted in his heritage, and became a Christian Scientist, as almost no one of note had done other than the Viscountess Astor, the first woman elected to serve in the House of Commons. And she, after all, was an American, Nancy Langhorne Astor, and something of a noisy, up-marrying titledigger. There were rumors that the Viscountess, herself a former Catholic, had mentored Philip in his quest, and the rumors were spot on.

In 1925, at 43, Kerr was chosen as Secretary of the Rhodes Trust, the grantor of scholarships designed to link exceptional American students to British history. He took the appointment so seriously that he toured America each year, visiting over time each of the states, until he gave up the post in 1939 to become His Majesty’s Ambassador. He came to love America for, and despite, its diversity. In one of his last Rhodes Reports, as war clouds were gathering, he wrote, “Personally I am convinced that the forces for righteousness are so strong in the U.S. that when they awake they will bring the U.S. into line for the world commonwealth. The greatest obstacle to good Anglo-American relations today is the ignorance and therefore the misunderstanding and suspicion between the political classes on both sides of the Atlantic.”

In the Thirties, Kerr was absorbed into Nancy Astor’s Cliveden Set, the appeasing crowd that gathered at her estate, in Cliveden, to abhor war at all costs. He fit the assemblage, having gone so far in 1937 as to have visited Adolf Hitler and come home declaring him not as bad as others, like Winston Churchill, said. Still, there was one thing that bothered him about Hitler. It was his contempt for Jews. Kerr couldn’t absorb that, nor accept it.

Finally, there was something else that would have bothered Chamberlain and Halifax if they hadn’t been too busy to notice. Kerr, by then Lord Lothian, was a patriot above all, and he gave up appeasement when Hitler’s first shot was fired, or at least three days later when Chamberlain declared war.

Churchill was expected to restructure his Foreign Office when he took over in May, but he had political considerations of his own on top of a war to fight, so he kept Halifax as Foreign Minister and Lothian in Washington.

Lothian had settled smoothly into his ambassadorial duties. He had a vast network of political, academic, and journalistic friends in America, and he was faultlessly charming. He sought out Wendell Willkie and passed on to London that they had nothing to fear from his candidacy, nor his election, and Willkie used Lothian as his link to Churchill during the campaign. He said Roosevelt had been wise in his June appointment of Henry Stimson and Frank Knox to his Cabinet, “securing two outstanding Republican personalities to fill two key two defense positions that notoriously needed strengthening.” Knox then brought Lothian into his confidence on the president’s desire to swap destroyers for British naval bases, using the ambassador to present the case to Churchill.

By November, Lord Lothian — Lothian in shorthand, Philip to his informal American friends — was the most important and most respected Englishman in America.

*

Lothian told his prime minister that previous British entreaties were “too diplomatic for the ears of ordinary Americans. The government understands, but the people will only respond to language that is memorable for its unambiguousness. They must be jolted. They know you’re tough and they admire that greatly, but now they must know you’re broke. You and I must say it in words that assure they will believe it. Our strategy must be to give the president an American population that supports England. In that way, he will have political security.” That troubled Churchill. One didn’t negotiate with an important friend though cleverly manipulated ultimatums. It was also an awkward discomfort for the master of the English language to be asked to strengthen his words for American ears, and quite a bold criticism of him from Lothian, down to that, but they were beyond vanity and obsequiousness now. They spent ten days shaping their messages, even to stage-managing the calendar.

Lothian would speak candidly with the press on his return, then see the president for a private discussion in more detail, in which he would apologize for his diplomatic lapses. Roosevelt was leaving Washington in early December for a two-week cruise of the Caribbean bases he had acquired in the destroyer deal. Lothian’s plan was for Churchill’s letter to be sent to the embassy, so that he could arrange its dramatic dispatch by seaplane to Roosevelt on his cruise. Brendan Bracken worked with Aubrey Morgan in New York to achieve the greatest possible press interest in Lothian’s visit to England, and the message he would bring back to America. The ambassador would say he “imagined” the prime minister would reach out to the president separately, but he was not privy to that. If they succeeded, complacency would shrivel, wither, and die.

Lothian’s plane was met in New York by a huge press contingent. He went to their microphones and said, “Boys, Britain’s broke. We have spent four point five billion American dollars on American food, weapons, and related material. We have enjoyed your fine products and your even finer friendship. But we’re busted now. Flat broke. We have gold reserves and marketable securities in the amount of less than two billion American. The next order we place with you may well exhaust our ability to pay. In the good old days, we could have arranged for the purchase on suitable terms involving cash and credit, but the good old days are gone forever. Your terms are cash-and-carry and we are deficient both in the cash and in the carry since our merchant fleet is so seriously decimated that we can no longer haul it home.”

He saw the president the next day. Roosevelt chided Lothian. He said, “You’re putting my feet to the fire.”

“Mr. President, I beg your forgiveness and your understanding. We are fully in the fire, feet to fedora. The prime minister asks me to urge you to ignore my theatrics and await a personal and private letter from him. Judge me as you will, but use his words, and not mine, for your appraisal.”

That week, a vigilant American Ambassador to the Court of St. James would have seen to it that Roosevelt sent Churchill birthday wishes on Saturday, the 30^th. Winston was 66 that day. The next day, such an ambassador might have passed along the news of the christening of the grandson and namesake of the prime minister, at which Winston was overheard to say, “Poor infant, to be born into such a world as this.” But on that Sunday, the first day of December, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy was in Hyde Park having a last lunch with his boss, and nothing nice was on the menu.

Kennedy had been busy in the two weeks since he agreed to step down. He gave an interview to the Boston Globe that included his opinion that democracy was dead in England, and soon would also be in America. He insisted that was said off the record, but didn’t deny it. Then he went west and told a crowd of Hollywood executives that portraying Nazis in their films as anti-Semitic was a bad misreading of the certain victor in the European war, and bad business for the European market that would emerge.

The Hyde Park lunch lasted only ten minutes. Roosevelt asked for Kennedy’s letter of resignation, and then excused himself. He told Eleanor, “I never want to see that sonofabitch again for the rest of my life.” The next day he went fishing. He commandeered the Heavy Cruiser Tuscaloosa and headed to the Caribbean to “inspect our naval facilities” and drop a baited hook or two in the company of a few cronies.