It was 70 years ago yesterday that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, floating perilously across a sea of U-boats, signed the declaration of wartime aims that came to be known as the Atlantic Charter.
The maps preserved at the Churchill War Rooms (CWR), Churchill’s former Westminster bunker, are heavily speckled by pinholes, not least across the Atlantic Ocean. Marking out the paths of convoys used to supply Britain even before this date, these carefully placed pins acquired even greater significance when Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Charter in a secret meeting aboard the USS Augusta on 14 August 1941. With a document of more symbolic than tangible immediate effect, Churchill thus secured the seed of what he would later call the Special Relationship. This was several months before Pearl Harbor made America’s direct involvement in the War inevitable.
Recently published in paperback, Churchill’s Bunker, a fascinating history of the Cabinet War Rooms, is the final book of much-respected historian Richard Holmes, who died last April. Through Holmes’ highly-readable discussion emerges the significance of the space to developing the Special Relationship, among many other aspects of the war effort.
Holmes highlights in particular the underground Map Room, ‘scoreboard’ of World War II. Manned 24/7 and connected to a myriad of offices via a ‘beauty chorus’ of telephone lines, the Map Room told the fast-developing story of advances and retreats. It is preserved today as it was left in 1945. When President Clinton visited, he remarked that this very room was the origin of the White House Situation Room. He was not wrong. Churchill, wedded to his maps, had re-created his Map Room in the White House during his visit in 1941. The Director of the Churchill War Rooms today, Phil Reed OBE, said that an unpublished memoir preserves the account of the man Churchill left behind at the White House to construct for Roosevelt a Map Room of his own – the later Situation Room.
While modern war policy is commonly considered the preserve of technology, Reed described to me his experience of a contemporary equivalent:
‘The Joint Strike Command Centre, RAF Northolt, has a set-up which manages all operations and movements. So every operation in Afghanistan is flicked back to there, authorized, and sent back. I had a privileged tour there once. There’s a wall, which must be about 80-90 feet long and 25 feet high, which is a series of screens making up one big screen, showing movement of all shipping. They have physical maps, too, in case things break down.’
It was the Cabinet Room, however, that had most symbolic value for Churchill. When he first entered it he famously exclaimed, ‘This is the room from which I’ll direct the war’. As Holmes explains, in reality Churchill spent as little time in his bunker as possible. The network of rooms, secured by the ‘Slab’ of concrete and metal defences above, might have been construed as offering the government far better security than that enjoyed by ordinary Britons (in fact it was far from impervious to potential bombing). The enemy, meanwhile, might have perceived its excessive use by the PM as a sign of fear. It was Hitler who would spend his last days cowering underground.
Holmes’ account benefits from several first-hand accounts of the War Rooms in action. What it does not describe is the physical marks left behind and preserved in the Cabinet Room. Sitting in Churchill’s chair, my fingertips chanced upon the indentations at the ends of its arms. Inflicted upon the wood by the pressure of Churchill’s fingernails, they immortalize the pressure experienced by the leader in the wartime years.
While America’s entry into the War did not resolve immediately all of Churchill’s concerns and anxieties, it helped clarify the possibility of aims for economic strength, security, and freedom from fear expressed in the Atlantic Charter. With an idealism exceeding anything laid out in recent years, such as the Iraq Resolution, it symbolised, at the very least, a realistic Transatlantic relationship.
While David Cameron may confess that he is not ‘some idealistic dreamer about the special relationship’, Churchill, quite unabashedly, was precisely that.
Churchill’s Bunker, by Richard Holmes, Profile Books, £8.99. The Churchill War Rooms are open to the public daily.
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