Churchill in Washington

On the evening of 18 June 1942 a large Boeing 314 flying boat of the British airline BOAC, named Bristol, alighted on the Potomac in Washington. On board was the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who had come to the United States for the second time in half a year to talk to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Waiting for him on the bank were the US Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, and the British ambassador, Lord Halifax.

The journey was a risky one. Two days earlier, on 16 June, Churchill had taken an unusual step: he had named to the King, in writing, his successor in case he did not return.

The letter to the King

Flying across the Atlantic in 1942 was not safe. Flying boats crossed the ocean without escort, and any breakdown meant coming down on the open sea. So before setting off Churchill, now 67, wrote to King George VI from Downing Street on 16 June. Availing himself, as he put it, of the monarch’s permission, he advised that should he die during the journey the King should entrust the formation of a new government to the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. In Churchill’s view Eden was the outstanding minister of the largest party in the House of Commons and in the National Government, capable of conducting the nation’s affairs “with the resolution, experience and capacity which these grievous times require”.

Under the British constitution the choice of prime minister belongs to the King, and a prime minister has no right to designate a successor. Churchill therefore could not appoint anyone; he was merely giving advice in case of sudden death. Even so, the letter carried political weight. Eden, a 45-year-old Conservative who had left Neville Chamberlain’s government in February 1938 in protest against the policy of appeasement, had been Foreign Secretary again since December 1940, and in May 1942 he had signed a treaty with the USSR in London. Eden himself later wrote that this letter began his long era as “heir apparent”. It lasted almost thirteen years: he did not become prime minister until April 1955, when Churchill stepped down.

At a moment of crisis

Churchill was leaving at a difficult moment. In the spring of 1942 Britain had suffered a series of defeats – the fall of Singapore, the loss of Burma, the escape of German warships through the English Channel – and criticism of the conduct of the war was growing ever louder in the House of Commons and in the press. In Libya the Battle of Gazala had been raging since 26 May. On 14 June General Claude Auchinleck agreed to a withdrawal from the Gazala Line, and Churchill cabled that he presumed there was no question in any case of giving up Tobruk. On 15 June Auchinleck replied that he had not the slightest intention of giving up Tobruk. With this assurance the Prime Minister left London by train on the evening of 17 June for Stranraer in south-west Scotland, from where Bristol took off during the night.

He was accompanied by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, his own chief of staff, General Hastings Ismay, and his physician, Sir Charles Wilson. The flight took about 27 hours. Churchill had already flown home from the Arcadia Conference in January in an aircraft of the same type.

The purpose of the journey was clear. After the Arcadia talks in December the Allies had agreed on the principle of “Germany first”, but not on how and where to strike at Germany in 1942. The Americans, and General Marshall above all, wanted to concentrate forces in Britain (Operation Bolero) and land in France in the spring of 1943. In case either the Russians or the Germans collapsed, a smaller landing was also being prepared for as early as the autumn of 1942, codenamed Sledgehammer. Roosevelt, who at the end of May had received the Soviet Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, in Washington, had agreed that the communiqué of 11 June should speak of a “full understanding” regarding “the urgent tasks of creating a Second Front in Europe in 1942”. The President wanted American soldiers to be fighting the Germans that very year. Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff considered a landing in France in 1942 impracticable and proposed instead a landing in French North Africa, a plan codenamed Gymnast.

Hyde Park

After a night at the British embassy, Churchill flew on 19 June to Hyde Park, Roosevelt’s family estate on the Hudson. The President drove to the airfield to meet him himself and took him round the area in a car fitted with hand controls, a ride the Prime Minister remembered as a drive along the edge of precipices. For two days the two men talked without their staffs, who had remained in Washington.

One of the subjects was the atomic programme. On 20 June Churchill discussed the British Tube Alloys project with Roosevelt. According to Churchill’s memoirs, they agreed that the two countries would pool all their information, work as equal partners and share the results, and that the plants would be built in the United States. The understanding was oral and left no trace in the American records. In the months that followed the US Army, which took over the programme, restricted exchanges with the British, and the dispute lasted until the Quebec Agreement of August 1943.

The same day Churchill handed the President a note on strategy for 1942. In it he wrote that no responsible British military authority had been able to make a plan for a landing in France in September 1942 that had any chance of success, unless the Germans became utterly demoralised. He asked whether, that being so, the Western armies could be left idle for the whole year, and suggested that operations in North Africa be considered again. On the night of 20–21 June the two leaders returned to Washington by train.

News from Tobruk

On the morning of 21 June Churchill was in the President’s study in the White House when a telegram was handed to Roosevelt. Without a word the President passed it to the Prime Minister: Tobruk, which a year earlier had withstood an eight-month siege, had capitulated, and some 33,000 soldiers had gone into captivity. Churchill recalled years later that it was one of the heaviest blows he received during the war: “Defeat is one thing; disgrace is another.” Roosevelt asked only: “What can we do to help?” Churchill asked for as many of the new M4 Sherman tanks as possible. Marshall agreed to hand over some 300 Shermans, taken from American armoured units that had only just received them, and 100 M7 self-propelled howitzers. One of the ships was sunk on the way; according to Churchill, the Americans made good the loss of their own accord, without being asked. The tanks reached Egypt at the beginning of September. Brooke later considered that the Americans’ attitude at that moment laid the foundations of the friendship between the two staffs.

The Second Washington Conference

The talks in Washington, held in haste and without a codename, are known as the Second Washington Conference. They lasted from 19 to 25 June. The British and American Chiefs of Staff, meeting as the Combined Chiefs of Staff, agreed that preparations for the invasion of France (Bolero) would continue, and that the plan for a landing in North Africa would be studied further as an option in case a landing in France in 1942 proved impracticable. The cautious wording concealed a disagreement. Marshall and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest King, regarded North Africa as a dispersal of forces, while Churchill did not believe in a landing in France in 1942. Tobruk strengthened his argument that the Middle East and the Mediterranean demanded urgent attention, and Roosevelt was inclined to have the Americans fight somewhere, anywhere, that same year.

Churchill also talked with members of the Pacific War Council and with representatives of other Allies, among them King Peter II of Yugoslavia. He met Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s closest adviser, through whom the most important business between London and Washington had passed since 1941. During the conference, on 25 June, Major General Dwight Eisenhower, head of the Army staff’s Operations Division, was given command of the American forces in the European Theater of Operations. On 24 June Churchill, together with Marshall and the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, watched exercises by new American divisions and a parachute drop at Fort Jackson in South Carolina.

On the evening of 25 June the Prime Minister took off from Baltimore in the same flying boat, flying via Newfoundland, and on 27 June he was back in Britain.

Place in the war

A crisis awaited Churchill at home. On 25 June the Conservative candidate lost the Maldon by-election to an independent left-winger, Tom Driberg, and a motion of no confidence was tabled in the House of Commons. In the debate on 1–2 July 1942 the motion was defeated by 475 votes to 25. The criticism did not die down, however, until the first victories came in the autumn.

The question of strategy was settled a month later. The British finally rejected Sledgehammer, and in July 1942 Marshall, King and Hopkins flew to London. On 25 July Roosevelt decided on a landing in North Africa, which, as Operation Torch, began on 8 November 1942 under Eisenhower’s command. This meant postponing the invasion of France to 1944, and Stalin regarded it as a breach of the promise of a second front. The Shermans sent after the fall of Tobruk fought in the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942. The June visit also showed how much the balance of power within the alliance was changing: Britain came asking for help, while the ever more powerful United States was increasingly determining the course of the war.