Ron Milam

Empire, War and Revolution

March 1, 2000

Kimball, Warren, Forged in War; Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. 341 pp plus end notes, bibliography and index.

Professor Kimball has written a “short” version of his 3-volume work, Churchill and Roosevelt, the Complete Correspondence. This is an account of two leaders elected from democracies during times of crisis, who developed a close, personal relationship, and who, according to Kimball, shaped the course of the war and laid the ground work for the post-world War II era. The book deals with both the official record of the war, gleaned from Kimball’s thirty years of extensive research on these two leaders, as well as the unofficial record from interviews, and personal memoirs of contemporaries. It is in the unofficial record that we hear about the personal drinking habits and the many health issues that affected both men. Kimball added an appendix which chronicles the various illnesses each man had during the war, and rejects historical judgments that indicate Roosevelt gave up much of Eastern Europe to the Soviets, because of his failing health, or that Churchill was drunk or hung-over in several of the critical meetings, thus creating an inability to make sound military decisions. Kimball finds no evidence to support these contentions. Along the way, the reader is treated to a rather concise, chronological tour through the history of World War II, at least in the European theatre, although frequent forays into the Pacific War as viewed by Churchill are taken.

Kimball holds both leaders in rare high esteem:

“Had an irresponsible statesman prattling about selfish interests led either Britain or the United States, the alliance could have been overwhelmed by the jealousies and fears that characterize nations. But neither Churchill nor Franklin Roosevelt fell prey to such actions”.1

Yet, they differed from each other remarkably. Roosevelt, according to Kimball, believed strongly in the free market world, with only economic, not political or military exertion on other nations. Churchill believed in exerting all influence on the British colonies, and was constantly irritated by Roosevelt’s discussions of altering Britain’s colonial world, particularly whenever the issue of India was raised. And this difference in beliefs greatly affected the way each looked at the post war world.

Kimball believes Churchill was as concerned about Roosevelt’s anti-colonialism stance and the pressures that would come to bear on the colonies, as he was concerned about Stalin’s inevitable expansion into Eastern Europe. Thus, while Churchill probably feared the Soviet empire’s ascendancy more than Roosevelt, this fear was tempered somewhat by the need to constantly fight for preservation of British colonies, or at least to defend their existence in a post war world.

Much of the first section of the book is devoted to Churchill’s determination to involve the United States in the war. Churchill appears to understand the political aspects of pressure in Congress from isolationists, and he accepts the next best thing, the use of United States productive capacity and money. No credence is given to the historical notion that British intelligence withheld knowledge of the imminent attack on Pearl Harbor, in order to get a commitment of men, but one is reminded of the Eric Hobsbawm position in Age of Extremes that the United States would not have entered World War II if it had not been for such an attack.2 Apparently, Kimball believes that Churchill was concerned that no United States troops would ever be committed, when he pessimistically told Chamberlain that FDR is “our best friend, but I expect he wants to be re-elected and I fear that isolationism is the winning ticket”. One year later, the attack on Pearl Harbor made the issue mute.

Kimball makes a case that Roosevelt always felt a stronger need to capitulate to Stalin’s wishes than did Churchill. One also can conclude from reading Kimball that Roosevelt “trusted” Stalin in so far as wartime activity was concerned. Both men recognized the Soviet Union’s critical role in defeating Hitler, but each delayed agreeing to Stalin’s insistence on a second European front until 1944 when the Overlord Channel crossing finally took place. Churchill was not as firm a believer in the need for a ground attack, but Roosevelt knew that the allies had to confront Hitler’s Army on the ground to achieve total victory, which was the goal after the U.S. entered the war. In Kimball’s view:

“Overlord did not “win” the war or determine Hitler’s fate, though it contributed mightily. Those things were accomplished by Britain’s survival in 1940 & 1941, by the killing ground in Russia that stopped the Wehrmacht and then bled it dry, by the economic and production strength of the United States, by the accumulated weight of all the military offensives against what Hitler called Festung Europa, and by the Nazi leader’s own inhumanity which made compromise and negotiation unthinkable”.3

What the Channel crossing did do was to assure an Anglo-American presence on the continent at wars end. But Kimball completely rejects the concept that the cross-channel invasion was designed to get into Western and Central Europe before the Russians, since the decision to invade at Normandy came well before the Red Army began to roll inexorably across Central Europe. Such beliefs, according to Kimball, are writing Cold War thinking into World War II.

Thus Kimball’s view of the Stalin role in the allied efforts was that both Roosevelt and Churchill viewed Stalin and his Russian troops as absolutely essential to the successful conclusion, which was the total destruction of Germany’s ability to wage war. While Churchill was more suspicious, and feared the post war maneuvering of a triumphant Russian Army, Roosevelt just wanted to rid the world of the Hitler menace as quickly as possible and Russia’s help was vital and welcomed.

Kimball’s treatment of the atomic bomb secrecy issue is consistent with his thesis that the ever-practical Roosevelt didn’t share such information with Stalin because he, like most scientists, did not comprehend the revolutionary potential of nuclear weapons. One can recall the frustration of the scientists in getting his attention on the subject, and the advice of his military leaders appears to be that this bomb would be just a “bigger bang”. (Roosevelt’s old friend and chief of staff Admiral Leahy is quoted as telling Truman that “the bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”)4 And, David Holloway in Stalin and the Bomb points out that while Stalin took a personal interest in Soviet atomic bomb research, at the same time his own scientists assured him that development of such a weapon would take ten to twenty years.5 Thus Kimball concludes that Roosevelt, with the acquiescence of Churchill, chose to keep the bomb a secret because he didn’t know if it would work, and since he was firmly rooted in the present, why make a decision until the decision had to be made?

Kimball avoids extensive use of the “what-if” temptations regarding Roosevelt’s death, but he can’t resist addressing the issue of whether he would have favored a demonstration rather than the actual dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He dismisses such conjecture by referring to discussions held in February 1941 and referred to in Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which identifies Roosevelt as having tentatively approved the use of poisonous gas in the battle of Iwo Jima, only because wind vagaries made the gas as dangerous to the users as to the target.6 Kimball believes that since there were no ethical-moral issues that received “mature considerations” during the final days of the Roosevelt administration, Roosevelt would probably have acted consistent with Truman in the decision to use the bomb.

Kimball’s view of these two men would probably be classified as “traditional”, because he believes that to view the mistakes of the Second World War through the perspective of the Cold War, distorts history. He believes that these two leaders always, when faced with crucial choices about victory versus postwar political advantage, always made the decision to keep the Grand Alliance together and to defeat the Axis. Had they not done this, none of the “later mistakes” could have been made since Hitler’s Germany and militaristic Japan would have won, or survived the war intact.

This book goes beyond the biographies of two influential leaders and addresses their relationship as determined by an interpretation of the volumes of personal and official correspondence between them. It contributes more to our knowledge than this relationship; it contributes equally to the debate of the war’s outcome on 20^th century geo-politics, even though it provides few concrete answers. It is, nevertheless, an enjoyable read.