FDR and Churchill on board HMS Prince of Wales during church services.
By Neil Earle
Seventy years ago this August the then island nation of Newfoundland was the stage set for one of history’s decisive turns. This was, of course, the secret meeting between Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain and President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) of the United States.
For more than two days, amid what had to be one of the darkest periods in Western civilization, the two statesmen and their top military advisors met to take each other’s measure and to more effectively map out a plan of action in the face of darkening news from Soviet Russia. The Nazis were clobbering the Red Army left and right. “Moscow is a gone coon” Churchill had said in private that summer. Thus it was proving vital for the two leaders to ascertain where and when the vast American productive capacity could best help their British customers. “Customers,” not Allies, because the United States was not then at war. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor was still four months away (December 7, 1941).The British were hanging in by their fingernails after being chased off the continent of Europe in 1940 and forced to endure the tragic indiscriminate bombing of her major cities in the winter of 1940-1941.
Above all it was necessary to focus on what help the Americans could give in securing what Churchill considered the most important lifeline of the war – the vital convoy supplies to England that kept the embattled island supplied. FDR wanted to help, indeed had done much already with the Lend Lease Act of March 1941 whereby seven billion dollars of aid was scheduled to flow across the Atlantic. But he was dealing with a jittery Congress and a still isolationist country, one that was more interested, in the words of one journalist, “in a dog fight behind Main Street than a world at war.” On his part the wily Churchill wanted an Atlantic meeting to try and bring the United States in as a belligerent. But FDR was already proving wilier still and the meeting off Ship Harbor in Placentia Bay, crucial as it was for all that would follow, would result more in a meeting of minds over planning for the onslaught that could follow from Imperial Japan.
But when an empire’s life is at stake a meeting of minds can be essential. This is what made the meeting in the wide waters of Placentia Bay that August so important, then and now. It is not too much to say that this rendezvous of two talented prima donnas on the stage of world history offered a foreshadowing of the way the world was going to go for the next 60 years. The United States was beginning her ascent to world power, Britain was staggering under the weight of global responsibilities she could no longer fulfill, and for Newfoundland, the American warships in Placentia Bay served notice of how much things were going to change. “The Yanks were coming” – 977 of them had already moved into St. John’s that January, 1941. This was the “destroyers for bases” deal of September, 1940 whereby 50 older U.S. destroyers would be used by the Royal Navy to hunt the U-boats infesting the North Atlantic.
Thus the meeting at Placentia Bay was more than just symbolic. Real results followed. Under Lend-Lease the Americans were fast building naval and air bases at St. John’s, and near Ship Harbor at Argentia. This would pump $300,000,000 into the Newfoundland economy and prove an economic magnet which lasted until 1994. More significantly, the appearance of the American president in home waters drove home that former British possessions were about to be drawn more into the American orbit and steadily away from connections to the British Empire. The American eagle was beginning to fly high.
What initially came out of the Argentia conclave – the first real “summit meeting” to use later terminology – was the Atlantic Charter, so dubbed by a British newspaper. This was FDR’s idea and drafted by the British. Here was an eight-fold declaration of joint principles of international law as understood by the English-speaking nations. It breathed the spirit of traditional liberal democracy without committing the United States to any overt action. It was a far-reaching document indeed. The fifth article mentioned the phrase “effective international organization” after the coming about of “a peace which will…cast down for ever the Nazi tyranny.” Article Eight called for all nations to seek “an abandonment of the use of force” in the future, a utopian-sounding proposal but one which showed how much the strain of bitter reality was showing on the Western democracies in the late summer of 1941.
Some historians then and now see the Atlantic Charter as so much eyewash, a mere recitation of wartime propaganda. However, like many such efforts, the joint declaration of August, 1941 helped raise the moral bar in international affairs, reiterated issues of self-governance and the like for the Western democracies in the spirit of people needing reminding more than instruction. The third article respected the right of all people to choose the form of government under which to live, tenets which are still being fought out in Libya, Syria and Afghanistan – the rule of law, the rights of the individual. The hint towards some means of “effective international organization” was a foreshadowing of the phrase Churchill and Roosevelt would use in their wartime correspondence – the united nations (lower case, then higher case later).
Broad statements of idealistic principles might seem unrelated to the “real world realities” but they nevertheless enshrine spiritual principles that brutal dictators sometimes flaunt to their peril. It was Napoleon Bonaparte who stated, somewhat astonishingly perhaps, that there are only two forces in the world of men, the sword and the Spirit. The Spirit, he said, was infinitely more powerful in the long run. According to the military historian Max Hastings, the Charter’s “noble phrases in support of a common commitment to freedom” enshrined principles that gave hope to struggling subject people around the world (Winston’s War, page 168). Churchill and FDR understood instinctively that struggling peoples need hope, something to fight for beyond the sometimes enervating rhythms of advance and retreat.
What immediately came out of it was FDR’s offer of 150,000 old rifles to the British and his determination the very next month that American naval vessels would “shoot on sight” any German U-Boats seen in the North Atlantic. This was pushing his presidential powers almost to the limit. From Argentia would sail the Reuben James in October and her sinking off Iceland with 100 men lost would do much to prepare American attitudes for war with Hitler. Indeed, Hastings reveals that FDR intended to “provoke war” not in the Pacific – as conspiracy theorists like to suppose – but in the North Atlantic where the U.S. Navy had already taken over escort duty for the convoys steaming from the east coast.
The Sunday of the summit offered a grand historic moment. The British hosted the Americans aboard the HMS Prince of Wales for a Sunday church service. The pulpit was draped with flags of two nations. As if to summon up the latent spiritual forces that lie behind such state occasions in times of peril, Churchill himself picked the hymns: ”Onward Christian Soldiers,” “O God Our Help in Ages past,” and – for the Americans – “Eternal Father Strong to Save.” “My God, this is history,” uttered an unknown clerk. It was indeed. As Churchill later wrote: “It was a great hour to live. Nearly half those who sang were soon to die.” This was an allusion to the sinking of Prince of Wales by Japanese planes that December.
And where the American eagle went the Canadian beaver would soon nervously follow. RCAF bases at Torbay and Goose Bay took shape. All of this military spending led to what historian Peter Neary described as the “economic miracle” of 1941-1942. Newfoundland and Labrador were pulling out of the economic doldrums of the Great Depression at last. Newfoundland’s strategic position soon earned her the nickname “Gibraltar of the West,” as Neary documents. In his memoirs Churchill noted that “the most important [base] for the North Atlantic convoys was Argentia, in Newfoundland” (The Grand Alliance, page 138). Neary’s account also reminds us that progress has its cost. To make way for the U.S. military the remains of 625 individuals were exhumed from the old graveyard at Argentia and reinterred in the new cemetery at Freshwater (page 155). This indignity has not been forgotten. Newfoundland drivers had to switch to the right side of the road when entering American territory and work alongside Americans who could buy duty free cigarettes at seven cents a pack. No wonder labor troubles soon emerged and an Argentia Labor Union took shape soon after the first soldiers arrived.
Politics! Politics! One of the lessons of history is that even with survival at risk, as in 1941, the tensions between labor and management, between insiders and outsiders will never quite cease. Yet in spite of it all, we are reminded how nothing great is ever achieved without sacrifice and that grand old hymns can speak volumes to those so attuned when the chips are down. Looking back, Hastings summarized, “here was something which our parents and grandparents did well in a noble cause.” Seventy years later, we remember.
(Neil Earle is a Los Angeles-based pastor and historian who returns to Newfoundland every summer. A version of this article appeared in the Placentia Charter on August 12.)