Roosevelt and Churchill on HMS Prince of Wales, in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, during the Atlantic Charter Conference.
The Atlantic Charter, August 1941 (part 1): the New World
By David Semple
In a recent article for JMA Jewish Media Agency, entitled “Independence Day: Celebrating the Anglosphere,” I wrote the following:
“To achieve victory, Churchill established the special relationship with President Franklin Roosevelt of the United States. In August 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter. This was before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Atlantic Charter became the first policy document for the wartime anti-Nazi alliance; a document which loudly proclaimed the kind of the post-war world the Anglo-Americans wanted to build, a world built upon the traditional English freedoms and liberties which inaugurated the democracies of the New World. Together with the British Empire, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (in alliance with Soviet Russia), worked together to save the freedoms and liberties of people throughout the world.”
The first two years of the Second World War were disastrous for Great Britain, but even worse for the countries of mainland Europe, across the English Channel. First came the Phoney War of 1939-1940, which saw Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia carve up Poland, while Britain dropped millions of leaflets over Germany. Neville Chamberlain, the man who came back from Munich holding a useless piece of paper (and declaring “peace in our time”) did not have the stomach to be a good war leader. He thought that he could destroy the Third Reich with a naval blockade. But Russia came to Hitler’s rescue by providing the necessary raw materials needed to supply the Nazi onslaught against the West in May 1940. In the space of two months, Western Europe collapsed in front of the Nazi war machine, first Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland and finally France. Hitler had eaten up all the democratic nations and then began to introduce his totalitarian New Order into all the occupied territories. A “new dark age”, which had begun in Berlin in January 1933, now spread across the whole of continental Europe. The Nazis raped Europe and turned it into a slave labour camp for the benefit of the German “master race.” Collaborator regimes were in place in those countries not directly under Nazi occupation, including Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Vichy France and of course the Soviet Union. Spain was neutral but run under a fascist regime. And Italy entered the war as Hitler’s ally on June 10 1940. Only Britain stood in Hitler’s path. Once Britain was forced to deal with the Nazis, Hitler was confident he would win his war for the domination of Europe.
The fall of Neville Chamberlain, the British champion of the “appeasement” policy which did so much to further the aims of Nazi Germany before the war, changed everything. Winston Churchill, who for ten years had been the most despised and unpopular rogue politician within the British establishment, became prime minister on May 10 1940. As France was collapsing in the path of Hitler’s tanks, hundreds of thousands of British and French troops were being evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk in what could only be called the greatest military catastrophe in British history thus far. Many more such catastrophes would follow over the next two years. But Churchill stood firm. He resisted all peace offerings from Italy and Germany, despite heavy pressure applied by some of his colleagues in the War Cabinet to make an accommodation with the Third Reich. Lord Halifax in particular could see no way through to victory for Britain. Hitler offered to leave the British Empire alone as long as Germany could remain dominant in Europe. But Winston Churchill understood Hitler more than the German Fuhrer understood Churchill.
Hitler and Churchill almost met in Germany in 1932, before the German Fuhrer’s rise to power. Martin Gilbert tells this story:
“When in November 1932, shortly before Hitler came to power, and Churchill was in Munich doing some historical research about the First Duke of Marlborough,…an intermediary [Putzi Hanfstaegl] tried to get him to meet Hitler, who was in Munich at the time and had high hopes of coming to power within months. Churchill agreed to meet Hitler, who was going to come to see him in his hotel in Munich, and said to the intermediary: ‘There are a few questions you might like to put to him, which can be the basis of our discussion when we meet’.”
Churchill questioned the intermediary about Hitler’s antisemitism. When the German tried to excuse Hitler’s attitude to Jews being the result of an influx of eastern European Jews, Churchill challenged him, saying, “Tell your boss from me that antisemitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker”. This was a racing term. What Churchill was saying was that, by persecuting Jews, he was backing the wrong horse.
When asked by the intermediary which issues Churchill wanted to talk about with Hitler, Churchill replied: “Why is your chief so violent about the Jews? I can quite understand being angry with the Jews who have done wrong or are against the country, and I can understand resisting them if they try to monopolise power in any walk of life, but what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born?”
Martin Gilbert comments:
“This may seem a simple sentiment to us now, but how many people, distinguished people from Britain, the United States and other countries, who met or might have met Hitler, raised that question with him? So surprised, and possibly angered, was Hitler by this question that he declined to come to the hotel and see Churchill.”
Winston Churchill knew that Hitler could not be trusted to keep his word. He knew that Hitler was worse than the tyrannies which had tried to undermine English freedom and independence over the centuries; worse than the medieval Popes, worse than Phillip the Second of Spain, worse than Louis the Fourteenth of France, worse than Emperor Napoleon, and worse than Kaiser Wilhelm. He knew that Hitler represented an evil ideology which threatened to destroy all that was precious about European civilisation. Victory for Hitler meant the end of the Enlightenment. Many in the English upper classes preferred Hitler to Soviet Russia. But Churchill knew that Nazism was worse than Communism. Churchill knew that were Britain to do a deal with the man he contemptuously referred to as “Corporal Shicklegruber,” Britain would fall under a Vichy-type regime. Churchill understood more than anyone else that victory for Hitler would bring the end of Christian civilisation.
The new prime minister prevailed over his colleagues in secret meetings of the War Cabinet discussing whether to do a deal with the Nazis in May 1940. A week before the fall of France, he made perhaps his most famous speech in the House of Commons on June 18 1940:
“What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over … the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
“But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.”
Churchill, more than anyone in his time, was prescient in this speech. He knew Hitler’s “new dark age” would introduce the darkest chapter in human history. He understood the meaning of Hitler. He knew that Nazi Germany must be defeated. He also knew what was necessary to defeat Hitler. On June 4 1940, his “fight them on the beaches” speech, pointed to the path to final victory:
“…we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
From the very beginning of the war, Churchill knew that, if Britain could hold out against Hitler, Hitler could not win his war. Churchill’s route to victory would be to drag the United States into the war.
[Part 2: For Those In Peril to follow]
David Semple is a Manchester Tory and film maker/broadcaster from Canada. He is currently writing a book called Jerusalem and the Fall of British Imperialism. With JMA’s Richard Mather he is co-writing a radio play called Jerusalem 2017: Imperial Sunset.
