A Blueprint for War by Susan Dunn

Author:Susan Dunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300203530
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER EIGHT

Joint Talks

ON JANUARY 9, 1941, Prime Minister Churchill and the members of his Cabinet gathered in London for a farewell luncheon. The aloof, aristocratic, strikingly tall fifty-nine-year old Lord Halifax was about to leave Britain to take up his new post as ambassador to the United States. It was, Churchill said, a mission “as momentous as any that the monarchy has entrusted to an Englishman in the lifetime of the oldest of us here.” Optimistic about the final outcome, he added, “We do not doubt the achievement of our purpose is within the power of the English-speaking peoples.”1

Four days later, Churchill and Harry Hopkins, FDR’s special envoy to Britain that winter, traveled to the Orkney Islands, at Scotland’s northern tip, to bid a safe voyage to Halifax and his wife. They were sailing on a new British battleship, the King George V, accompanied by American and British officers, with an escort of destroyers.

Halifax had not asked for this mission, nor had he been Churchill’s first choice. After Lord Lothian’s death in mid-December, the prime minister wanted to appoint David Lloyd George, the World War I prime minister. He had even gotten President Roosevelt’s approval, though American officials were privately dismayed that the energetic, effective Lothian would be replaced by a superannuated politician who had guided Britain through a devastatingly pyrrhic victory in 1918 and had until recently been an outspoken appeaser. Rumors of the White House’s disappointment reached Churchill, and fortunately, Lloyd George withdrew, citing health reasons.2

Then Churchill turned to Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax. Halifax had also been a prominent appeaser in the 1930s, and a highly influential one after he became foreign secretary in 1938. But he had backed Churchill to succeed Neville Chamberlain in May 1940, and Churchill retained him as foreign secretary. Still, the prime minister never fully trusted him after Halifax pushed for a negotiated peace with Hitler shortly after Churchill took charge, when British forces were trapped at Dunkirk. Had Churchill not managed, narrowly, to turn the Cabinet away from Halifax’s plan, he might have had to resign as prime minister.3

Now, however, the prime minister expressed complete confidence in his new ambassador. “I know that courage and fidelity are the essence of his being,” Churchill said of Halifax at the sendoff luncheon. “He has vowed himself to prosecute this war against the Nazi tyranny at whatever cost until its last vestiges are destroyed.” A few weeks earlier, Hopkins had met Halifax in London. “I liked him,” he wrote. Though Halifax was too conservative for his taste, Hopkins felt that all that mattered was to “get on with our business of licking Hitler.” For his part, Halifax was reluctant to move to a country he considered less cultivated than England, but as he wrote to Churchill the day after Christmas 1940, “In war one can but do what one is told!”4

At midafternoon on January 24, 1941, after a harrowing Atlantic crossing amid blizzards and prowling Nazi submarines, the King George V dropped anchor five miles from an Annapolis shore shrouded in fog and rain.

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