Churchill's Hour (33 page)

So why did Pearl Harbor happen—or why was it allowed to happen? After all, many of the Japanese codes were broken, an attack was expected. A 1946 Joint Congressional Investigating Committee described Pearl Harbor as ‘the greatest military and naval disaster in our nation's history.' So whose fault was it?

For decades the hunt went on to identify appropriate scapegoats, and it still continues today. Explanations range from simple chaos to sublime conspiracy. Roosevelt knew, some believe, and withheld the knowledge in order to force a reluctant America into the war. No, others claim, it was Churchill who knew, and who deceived.

Far too much of the argument for conspiracy depends on assuming not only that the statesmen knew everything but understood everything and had no blind eyes. Surely what is far more interesting in trying to understand that extraordinary character of Winston Churchill is not simply what he did but
what he might have done. If he had known beforehand, would he have allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to go ahead?

Churchill was a man of overwhelming and at times self-consuming emotion, yet he was also capable of setting aside emotion to reveal the foundations of fact that lay beneath. The facts of Pearl Harbor are these.

The loss in lives was, by comparison to other wartime disasters, minor. Placed in the scales alongside so many other calamities of war, the numbers were neither unique nor even exceptional.

Of the eight American battleships that were hit, three returned to service within three weeks, and three more within three years. All the vessels that were hit were elderly. The American aircraft carriers that were to prove the crucial weapon in the battle for supremacy in the Pacific had left port several days beforehand and escaped entirely unscathed.

Pearl Harbor may have been a day of infamy, but it was not in historical terms a tragedy. Indeed, from some perspectives, it was more of a deliverance from the doubts and jaded arguments that had blinded the United States for so long. As Roosevelt told both Churchill and Stalin at the Yalta Conference in 1945, without Pearl Harbor it would have been very difficult to get the American people to agree to go to war.

So far as Churchill was concerned, Pearl Harbor was everything.

‘No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy,' he wrote afterwards. ‘We had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end…Being saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.'

So let us return to the question: if Churchill had known, would he have allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to proceed? Would he have exchanged two thousand American lives for survival and victory? Would he have turned a blind eye?

Yes, he would. It would have been what was required of him as a statesman. England expects.

That was why he was also able to deal with the extraordinary conflict between his role as a war leader and his role as a father. Churchill was not a careless father, far from it; he struggled all his life to build around him the family that he as a child had never enjoyed. Yet for a time he was also, in a
very real sense, the father of the entire free world. That he was able to deal with this personal conflict of loyalties was not a measure of his callousness but of his greatness.

The story of his family and the other characters in this book did not, of course, finish with 1941. Averell Harriman continued to play a leading role in the Allied cause, and in 1943 was sent to Moscow as the US Ambassador. After the war he returned to his marriage and to the United States to take up several hugely important roles. He became governor of New York and even ran for President.

Meanwhile, Pamela led a life of considerable notoriety with many other men that became the subject of several books, yet she never forgot about Harriman. They had become war-tossed lovers in the mould of Admiral Nelson and his beloved Emma, and their trans-Atlantic passion had been still more far-reaching. It had helped ignite a world war.

And, thirty years after they met in wartime London, Averell and Pamela were married. They spent fifteen years as man and wife before Averell died only a few years short of his one-hundredth birthday.

Even that failed to slow down Pamela. President Clinton appointed her US Ambassador to France in 1993. She died in Paris four years later, one of the most controversial yet acclaimed women in the world.

The story of the relationship between Sarah Churchill and Gil Winant had no soft and happy ending. Winant had been a fine public servant and a superb ambassador to London, but he was an intense and often lonely figure, and when President Truman succeeded Roosevelt, he was shunted aside. He wanted to fill the gap left in his life through his relationship with Sarah, but she was not willing. In 1947, spurned by Sarah and by his former colleagues in Washington, this talented but tormented man retired to his bedroom, put a pistol to his head and killed himself.

Randolph's life continued to be tempestuous. He returned from the war to discover Pamela's infidelities and their divorce came shortly thereafter. What he seemed to have had far more difficulty in dealing with was his parents' refusal to turn their back on Pamela. It caused intense rows; more than once Randolph was thrown out of the family home. His life thereafter was dominated by anger and alcohol, interspersed with some very fine writing.

Max Beaverbrook did eventually resign—two months after Pearl Harbor, and although he later returned to the Government he was never the same force again. It was Eden who became Prime Minister, in succession to Churchill in 1955, but only after he had left his wife and married Clarissa, Churchill's niece.

And Sawyers—what became of Frank Sawyers?
The historical record is sparse, yet it attests to a man of character, humour and discretion. He was undoubtedly one of the great English manservants and was an immense support to Churchill. Yet he left Churchill's household in 1947 of his own accord and his trail runs dry. Whatever he did, wherever he went, let us hope he found fulfilment. He was one of those many, many unsung heroes who helped Churchill finish the job.

It's usually at this point that I spend a few lines emphasizing that this series of books should be read as fiction and not as history. And I happily do so again. However, even the very best of histories can provide only a fragment of any story, and although the life of Winston Churchill has been trawled as assiduously as any man's, there is so much of importance that historians cannot know. I'm thinking here not simply of those quiet events in his life that inevitably went unrecorded but even more of the emotions, the inspirations, the ambitions—those ‘inner' events—that drive us all. In many circumstances they may prove to be decisive, but we can only guess at their nature. Such guesswork isn't fruitless; indeed, it can illuminate what we know and make it more intelligible, and can open our eyes to possibilities that we hadn't previously considered. Even if we then come to reject those possibilities, we do so on the basis of having got to know our man just a little better.

Churchill was a most complex man. He was always restless, never settled, driven by many ‘inner' events. While I have tried to be faithful to the record of events in 1941, I hope the reader will forgive the inevitable dramatic flexibilities I have used to turn them into a novel. And if at any point I have failed to capture the ‘inner' events accurately, that is my fault and not the responsibility of the many kind people and Churchill enthusiasts who have tried to help me as I worked on
Churchill's Hour.

Among them, as always, are the Churchill Centre and Societies whose excellent organization has done so much to promote the understanding of Churchill's achievements. The Centre's website—www.winston churchill.org—is a mine of both information and inspiration, as is their journal,
Finest Hour
, so admirably edited by Richard Langworth. I suspect that some of the members may disagree with the manner in which I have portrayed him—how could Winston have been less than totally honest with the United States?—but that is part of the challenge and delight in dealing with a man with as many facets as Churchill. He always enjoyed a bloody good argument, and it seems only right that he should continue to provoke others.

I would also like to thank Terry Charman and his colleagues in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. They seem to have the answer to almost any factual question that is put to them, and they
provide the answers in a manner and at a speed that would have impressed even the impatient old man himself.

There have been some close personal friends who have, as always, been magnificent—Andy Mackay for his ability to guide me through the dance of the Latin pluperfect subjunctive; Roger Katz, who is perhaps the finest bookseller in the world and who helped provide the initial inspiration for this series; Quintin Jardine, who is a magnificent crime writer and whose common sense kept me on the Churchillian course; and Eddie Bell, who has always been there to guide my hand, my head and my heart along the sometimes tangled pathways of authorship.

The words seem ridiculously inadequate, but I also want to express my love to Rachel, who was wonderful enough to allow our wedding date to be squeezed in between the first and final drafts of
Churchill's Hour.
Thank you, Mrs Dobbs.