Allied blindness
George Gale
Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence edited by Francis L. Loewenheim, Harold D. Langley and Manfred Jonas (Barrie & Jenkins £10,00) IT will probably be useful to have this most celebrated political correspondence collected together: it will come in handy for some (but by no means all) subsequent researchers into the subject of the conduct of the 1939-45 war. But it is hardly likely to interest the general reader, unless he is is sufficiently misled by the title to believe that, should he continue to plough through the worthy seven hundred odd pages, he will eventually turn up some piece of buried historical treasure. It is a piece of collective historiography in the orthodox American-Germanic tradition, stuffed with footnotes and reference to other printed works. Three historians have collaborated; but they have not told us who did what. "A word" they jointly write in their preparatory note "about editorial practices" and you might expect them to tell us of their respective contributions, but not so. Two is company and three is not only a crowd but also a committee: and I do not believe that good historiography can ever come out of a committee.
There is not any particular difficulty for historians to get at the Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence. It was secret during the war but it is not so now; and it might be thought that the editing of it could 'have been left to a couple of research students. Alternatively, had a serious historian given himself the task of studying, rather than editing and annotating, the letters, and had then given us the result of his reflections consequent upon that study, we might have been given some illuminating insights. The reader, supposing one to exist who will embark upon this volume and sweat his way through, pausing page by page to check up references to other books, might just about end up with some such insights. But it is doubtful, unless the reader is an historian happy to let professors Loewenheim, Langley, and Jonas do some of the donkey work for him. In other words what we have here is a work which, ostensibly written by historians, is in practice a compilation awaiting an historian.
There naturally is much of interest in this exchange of letters, initiated by Roosevelt on September 11, 1939, thus:
'My dear Churchill, It is because you and I occupied similar positions in
the World War that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back in the Admiralty . . . What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times yvelcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about ..."
and concluded five years and five months later, on April 11, 1945, again from Roosevelt to Churchill, thus:
Your 944. I would minimise the general Soviit problem as much as possible because these problems in one form or another, seem to arise every day and most of them straighten out . . . We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct.
What is argued about still and likely to remain unresolved is, Had in fact Roosevelt's and Churchill's course been correct? This volume will help people towards confirming their minds, if they are already made up: but I do not think it will assist those whose minds remain open.
For a start, the record is incomplete: the authors reprint 548 documents, but it would 'appear that Roosevelt wrote something like seven hundred letters to Churchill and Churchill getting on for a thousand to Roosevelt. At all events, we have here less than a third of their wartime correspondence, and the authors, for all their Ieneral and particular introductions, preface, notes of thanks, chronology, maps, bibliography and index, do not, so far as I can discover, explain the basis of their selection. Is it an anthology of what they choose to regard as the most interesting bits; or have other considerations of selection been chosen, or forced upon them?
The authors, however, do themselves, offer some conclusions, as, for instance, that "in his last days Roosevelt stood together with Churchill, as rarely before," which suggests that Roosevelt was moving toward's Churchill's generally suspicious posture in the face of Russian territorial and political ambitions. Generally the authors' conclusions are sensible. They suggest that the correspondence they have most assiduously, if partially, edited, establishes that during the 1939-45 period Roosevelt "never had any secret plans to take the United States into war"; that, after Pearl Harbour, "Roosevelt and Churchill developed no coherent political strategy to match their highly successful grand strategy," neglecting "almost entirely, the ideological nature of the war"; that "the President's determination to delay all substantive decisions about the conditions of peace until the Axis had been defeated a strategy in which Churchill reluctantly concurred proved to be a grave and costly miscalculation"; that neither Churchill nor Roosevelt anticipated the cold war and that both of them "displayed little interest in such fateful subjects as Nazi atrocities and the fate of the European Jews, the development and uses of atomic weapons and power, the future of China, the European resistance, the German opposition to Hitler, and the question of access to divided Berlin"; and that neither men "really came to grips with the question of the future of the colonial empires."
These conclusions are unsurprising, for, after all, Roosevelt declared the policy of 'unconditional surrender' a policy which, with its absolute and negative nature, presupposed an inability to think beyond the end of the war at Casablanca in January 1943, and although the use of the phrase surprised Churchill at the time, and although its meaning was to be argued about later, what was good enough for Roosevelt had, perforce, to be good enough for Churchill, the better statesman but the junior politician.
The correspondence establishes that the post-war myth of the war as a crusade had very little basis in reality indeed, and if they do nothing else, an anthology of letters and their editors who remind us of the unreality of that _myth cannot but serve a most useful and remedial purpose.
George Gale is a former editor of The Spectator
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