No Hard Feelings
» Ever since 1940 the British in our midst have suffered in silence from the thoughtless or malicious criticism of Anglophobes. Here at last is an Englishman who speaks out, to strengthen — not weaken — the understanding of allies.
by JAMES LANSDALE HODSON
1
SOON after I came to the United States, somebody spoke to me of those who are “homesick on both sides of the Atlantic.” I am about to join their ranks. I return to London, but not all of me will return. A few months ago when my ship sailed into New York I had a curious feeling that I had been there before, that I was coming home. I do not account for it; I do not try. But I know that the strange feeling is a little rationalized because America has endeared itself to me.
Why? There are a score of reasons — quick, warm friendship, a variety of scene, climate, and terrain that is superb, a zest for life and living, a democratic style that is typified by the drugstore at the street corner but above all by the acceptance of people of almost every race without much stopping to think who they are. I have begun to feel that the United States, with all its imperfections, is mankind’s most hopeful experiment up to date.
But I am not writing to set down compliments, deeply sincere as they are. My view, as a result of visiting twenty American cities on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, in the Middle West and the South, is that we British would get along better with America and Americans if we were franker and more outspoken, and, from time to time, critical. For Americans do not hesitate to be critical of us British, and especially of us English. (The Scots, the Welsh, and the Irish are less often the targets.) No Englishman can come to the United States for the first time — as I have done — without being surprised. That surprise will often be linked with delight; it will sometimes be linked with despair: despair at the lack of understanding between us, despair at the deplorable ignorance of basic facts.
When I came to America last December, not one American in a hundred knew that the British casualties in the Tunisian campaign were nearly twice those of America — 35,000 to 18,000. (I did not myself know that, of the three divisions which landed at Salerno under General Mark Clark, two were British and one was American. This last fact had been withheld from us.) Conversely, very few English folk know of the mighty and valiant part American ships have played in the Russian convoys to Murmansk and Archangel. I was lately at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. The students of political economy had been asked to mark places on the map where United States troops were fighting unaided. A fair number ringed Italy, Burma, and New Guinea.
How easy it is for disunity among the United Nations to feed on such ignorance as I have noted. Those of us who write bear a heavy burden of responsibility—a responsibility equal, or nearly equal, to that of governments or politicians. For if we do not speak out, who will? It is not our job to be Yes-men to the Powers That Be. And again, if we do not interpret our peoples to one another, who will?
The average Englishman would open his eyes very wide if he read some of the editorials in the Chicago Tribune or the Hearst Press or glanced at some of the full-page advertisements that have been appearing in New York newspapers denouncing the White Paper on Palestine. I have one of these advertisements in front of me now. It is addressed to the British government and it cries: “Stand back from the door of salvation, lest in the eyes of mankind and history you make a sham and a mockery of the exalted purpose to which we are together pledged and for which our sons together fight and die on the field of battle. . . . Open the Gates of Palestine. . . . Open the one near and practical sanctuary to the handful of bleeding refugees who clamor at its gates.”
There is no mention in this advertisement that Palestine’s doors are not shut and that there is no question of shutting them till a further 30,000 Jews have been admitted; no mention either that the doors of the United States are shut to Jews, or that this problem is one for the whole world to solve and not Palestine alone — that we in Britain and you in America have an equal responsibility.
I am not opposed to criticism; I am in favor of it. But it should have facts for its foundation, and between allies it had better be tempered and responsible. I have no quarrel with Voltaire’s dictum: “I disagree with every word you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.” Only, if there is to be criticism, it must — like Lend-Lease — be a two-way affair. Colonel Robert McCormick’s paper described Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten the other day as a “playboy.” I wonder what the Colonel would have said if an English newspaper had pointed out, when General Eisenhower became Supreme Commander, that he lacked combat experience? I imagine the gallant Colonel would have been excessively pained.
In moving about America I have devoted some time to asking why those who are anti-British are anti-British. I think it well that we should know the facts; good relationships are rarely founded on legends. I have been given a variety of reasons why we are not liked better: the English are high-hat and arrogant; Britain is going Red; Britain, on the other hand, is not a democracy, for she still has royalty, and the Old School Tie weights the scale in favor of fools when appointments are made; Britain has the smartest diplomats and businessmen in the world and their subtlety and Machiavellian methods outwit Americans; Britain always fights her wars with other folks’ blood and treasure; Britain draw’s great revenues from India and, despite what she has said, has no intention of getting out of India; England governs Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa — the suggestion that they are independent is just baloney and, anyhow, what did Mr. Churchill mean by saying he had not gone into office to liquidate the British Empire?
The English have no sense of humor, I have been told; the English accent is awful — nobody can tell what they say; the British didn’t pay their war debts last time — they’ll never be forgiven for that; for the second time the British have dragged Americans into war — they sold the United States a bill of goods last time and they’ve done it again; the British have Mr. Roosevelt in their pocket, and now they are meddling in the Presidential elections; Lord Keynes, the British economist, put over on Roosevelt a system of financing deficits which American bankers know is unsound and which British bankers know is unsound and with which the British government would have nothing to do.
Britain won’t help America fight Japan, I have heard people say; as soon as the war in Europe is over, she’ll pack up, and she’ll be using the machinery America has given her under Lend-Lease to capture foreign markets while the United States is still fighting. They ask why Churchill said, “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job,” and why Roosevelt said that not a single American soldier would be sent to fight on foreign soil, when both knew that what they said was not true.
2
A FURTHER complication exists: precisely where anti-British feeling is integrated into feelings that are anti-Negro, anti-Jew, anti-Communist, antiRussian, and anti-internationalist is extremely hard to say. And how far Axis agents are responsible, how far it is they who play on the normal hatred of Americans — and especially of American mothers — for war, is even harder to judge.
We all want peace at the earliest moment consistent with winning what we fight for; we all think war monstrous; we British (in my personal view) can endure the slaughter of our young manhood even less than America can, for we have fewer men and we have endured the slaughter two years longer — our casualties in proportion to our population are nine times yours. But we had better beware of the use the enemy makes of our loathing for war, our desire for peace, our anxiety to be just. A job left half done will have to be done again. Unless we convince Germany and Japan that war is a mistake and does not pay and had better not be embarked on again, we shall have failed.
At home I call myself a radical; I have never voted Conservative; I am one of those who occasionally remind Mr. Churchill — who commands my admiration and affection — that he is not God; it would not break my heart if the House of Lords were abolished — quite the contrary. May I, then, say a word in reply to some of the criticism of us? I speak for nobody but J. L. Hodson. Have you met any English who are high-hat? What proportion are they? Did Shakespeare never make you laugh, nor Charles Dickens, nor Gracie Fields? Britain is not going Red. Britain is deeply conservative — with a small c. We are not going violently in any direction, although I hope and believe we are going to have a goodly part of the Beveridge Report recommendations and a greater measure of social security for our workpeople than hitherto.
We have royalty but we also have Labor cabinet ministers — Herbert Morrison, Ernest Bevin. We have had a Labor Government and in due time we shall have another. We English do not think our businessmen and diplomats so smart. The businessmen do not keep slumps from putting millions out of work, and our diplomats have not kept wars away. As for fighting wars with others’ blood, the British Commonwealth had a million dead and two and a half millions wounded in the last war. Your figures were trifling by comparison.
We don’t draw a darned ha’penny in taxes from India, and we shall depart from India as soon as this war is finished and Indians can agree among themselves on the Constitution they want; we are pledged to do it. Mr. Churchill could hardly have said he had become Prime Minister to liquidate the British Empire. Why should he? Would you concede that without our Empire this war would have been lost? And would that have been a good thing? How could we take our leave of India while the war was on and hand that continent over to the Japanese? Does anybody suggest that Russia or the United States should emerge weaker from this war than when it started to fight? And if not, why should the British Commonwealth be weaker? Where does our sin lie?
If we had gone down in 1940 when we stood alone against Hitler, would not the world have been lost? Our accent may be annoying to American ears, but, after all, we arc the original talkers of English. Would you tell a Frenchman that his French accent was offensive? Sure we didn’t pay all our war debts last time, bill we paid them up to 1917 — and Edward Stettinius points out in his recent book on Lend-Lease that we could not have paid the lot because America would not accept payment in the only coin that we could use — goods. Moreover, far more war debts were owing and unpaid to us than we failed to pay America. And — if I may be excessively blunt — would you, anyhow, pit your lost dollars against our English dead? For that was a war in which you finally decided it was right to fight — and you reached the starting line two years late.
The charge that we are meddling in your Presidential elections was made — and has recurred since — when the Yorkshire Post in January this year and The Church of England Newspaper a fortnight later spoke with approval of the possibility of Mr. Roosevelt’s running for a fourth term. I imagine that the copies of these newspapers which circulate in America could be counted on two hands. Mr. Anthony Eden was described in at least one United States paper as owning the Yorkshire Post. He doesn’t own it, but he has connections by marriage with the family that does. These two newspapers do not speak for Britain any more than the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New Orleans Times-Picayune speak for America. There are five Church of England papers, and the Yorkshire Post is less influential than the Manchester Guardian.
But why should we British be expected to be uninterested in who is to be your next President? The future peace of the world may, in part at least, turn on it. If you elected an isolationist President, I, for myself, should regard that as inimical to future world peace and as imperiling the lives of my children. Since when have events affecting all mankind been above comment in any nation except that wherein those events occur? Did Americans never comment on Hitler’s goings-on or Mr. Neville Chamberlain’s?
3
WITHIN the past few weeks United States newspapers have widely commented on and, in the words of the Dallas Morning News, widely censured Mr. Churchill for seeking a vote of confidence after being defeated on whether or not women should have equal pay with men. This, I suggest, was a purely domestic British issue. You did not hold aloof from it, and I don’t complain of that. Comment is free — or should be. New Orleans said the Prime Minister should not have forced that choice on the Commons; “Churchill cracks his whip,” said the Herald Tribune; “He was fundamentally wrong,” said Oklahoma; Cleveland spoke of “this arrogance in home affairs”; Atlanta said Mr. Churchill had done himself and his party great harm; and Savannah had an article on Mr. Eden as the next Prime Minister. Louisville said the British political truce wears thin and Mr. Churchill’s attitude was that of “a weary and somewhat disheartened man.” Tine St. Louis Star-Times said it was too bad that because of stupid censorship most Americans were unaware of this drift in British politics. Few United States newspapers refrained from commenting and saying frankly what they thought.
How does this square with resentment at British comment on your Presidential elections? It does not square at all. When English newspapers referred to the flirtation with Darlan in North Africa, they were said to be sniping at General Eisenhower; Americans showed much dislike of this sniping. But today American sniping at Lord Louis Mountbatten and our army in Burma is pretty widespread. The Boston Globe on March 14, when extolling in its leading article the work of your General Stilwell in Burma, ended: “To compare this military feat with the slow advance of the British-Indian forces towards Akyab may seem unfair. Yet the comparison is inescapable. Stilwell’s handful of soldiers and road builders seek to save China by re-opening her supply line. Lord Louis Mountbatten’s gigantic army is concerned with the reconquest of imperial preserves. Does this explain the difference?”
On April 11 in the same paper, Mr. Fletcher Pratt, a columnist, returned to the attack, ending his article: “In other words the British India Government is still fighting to restore the Empire as it was, not to beat the enemy.” I was with our army in Burma for a time and I should say that Air. Pratt’s statement is great nonsense, but my point is this: Suppose English journalists were to animadvert on an American army in this critical fashion — can anybody imagine Americans enduring it with equanimity?
To do justice to the Chicago Tribune would require a good deal of space. On March 29 this paper said, “Our soldiers [in England] may be unhappy but they may console themselves with the thought that they are doing more for the British than merely winning the war for them. Our men overseas are going to vote . . . [in] England where there is no written constitution to safeguard the people’s rights; where Parliament is unchecked; where men can be held in jail indefinitely without trial and where elections can be dispensed with.” On the same day: “Americans refuse to accept the British view that the military are a superior class entitled to rule and instruct the common people.” On March 30, under the heading “Overtaxed Executives,” the Tribune said, “Perhaps Mr. Churchill can lighten his load [by leaving military decisions to military men] and also by strengthening his war cabinet by getting an abler man as Foreign Secretary.”
This same newspaper grows enraged at any British comment on the American scene. During the past six months Colonel McCormick, who owns it, has delivered himself of some remarkable pronouncements, including one that we English are trying to upset the American Republic, that a transfer of territories ought to take place to balance Lend-Lease (he ignores the fact that 10 per cent of the British war effort goes into reverse Lend-Lease and that we have given America several inventions, including jet-propelled aircraft), and that after the last war, he, McCormick, assisted the United States War Department in drawing up plans for the defense of Detroit against attack by the British. This last puts a stamp on most of the anti-British remarks he makes.
How far Lord Keynes ever influenced President Roosevelt in his financial judgments I have no idea, but I personally could wish that Keynes had exercised more weight on our government at the time when it did nothing for the unemployed but keep them standing idle at the street corner, drawing the dole and rotting in both body and soul.
Shall we not fight the Japs? Are we not fighting them now? Are not some of our warships already in the Pacific? Have we not as much cause to hate and destroy the Japanese as you have? I believe so. We shall certainly be there. As for why Air. Churchill said, “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job,” I thought it mistaken at the time; I never saw how our Commonwealth could do it all unaided. I remember saying to a distinguished American war correspondent in Arras in 1939 that in my view this war was America’s as much as Britain’s. He and I both fought in the last war; we were in Arras again going over the old battlefields. I said, “I can see no reason why my boy should be killed any more than yours. It’s the same war against the same folk after a twenty years’ armistice.” He didn’t like it and didn’t accept it; I believe he accepts it now.
I am aware that this almost monosyllabic reply to criticisms of us leaves much untouched. The Southern Irish, for instance. At least twice since I came to America I have found myself defending Eire to irate Irishmen, for they were ignorant both of the number of Southern Irish fighting in our armed forces and the distinction a good many of them have won. Facts can be very different from general impressions. But at all events Americans who bitterly resent the presence of German and Japanese consuls and agents in Eire, imperiling, as they think, American soldiers’ lives, must be conscious now that two sides exist in Anglo-Irish affairs.
4
WE BRITISH are deeply grateful to America for what you have done for us. We do not forget, and shall never forget, that within six days of the fall of France the first of those 80,000 machine guns you sent us, the first of those millions of rounds of ammunition and those old French 75’s, reached our shores. That was the time when Mr. Churchill delivered himself of that defiant cry that we would fight on the beaches and in the streets and on the hills, and would never surrender; and then he added, sotto voce, “And we will hit them over the head with bottles, for we have nothing else.”
We are deeply grateful to you. I hope you are a little grateful to us also. We stood, and the earth abided. In our gratitude to you, we have, I think, flattered too much, appeased too much. I don’t think you like it. I think you are suspicious of it, wonder what we are after, what our ulterior motive is. Why should we flatter you? We have been in the war two years longer; our soldiers do their work for one-third the pay of yours; our workmen in our factories work longer hours — also for one-third the pay; our food is lamentably small compared with yours; your rationing is a farce compared with ours; we have conscripted grandmothers — and your labor leaders assert that a National Service Act in America would be slavery. We are fighting the same foe, but inequalities between us remain very great.
Our respective governments, if they exercised more common sense and vision, could prevent some, at least, of the founts of satire and irony. I am thinking of medals — we give too few, and you are lavish. We have men who fought off the German bombers in the Battle of Britain who have no ribbon to wear. We need a common medal for campaigns fought side by side.
The need for interpretation between our two nations remains very great. Ignorance is deep. Films can do much, and do. An equitable balance between American pictures on our screens and British pictures on yours is desirable. I do not think such a balance exists. Between 30 and 40 per cent of America’s revenue from pictures is drawn from the British Isles. Yet during the past twelve months hardly one British film made by British capital in Britain has been bought by America. When British films are shown, they tend to be shown in the smaller theaters. True, we make some indifferent pictures, but not all are indifferent. We are ourselves to blame for not being tougher; we have a powerful bargaining weapon in that 30 to 40 per cent I spoke of; we don’t seem to be using it. We had better use it — our good relationship depends, in part, on your seeing more British films and getting to know us better.
The commercial gentlemen of Hollywood have something of a strangle hold on your screens. It would, in my view, be for the good of unity among the Allies, and ultimately for world peace, that the magnificent series of films made for the United States Army, beginning with Prelude to War and going on through Divide and Conquer, The Nazis Strike, Battle of Britain, Battle of Russia, Know Your Ally Britain, Battle of China, and NegroSoldier, should be seen by the vast American public. With rare and isolated exceptions, that has not happened. It is always simple for film magnates to argue that documentaries don’t pay, that the public won’t go to see them. The public has had precious little chance to go. But must the final test always be dollars and cents when the lives of our sons and grandsons are at stake? Those are American films made by Americans. Nobody who saw them could pretend any longer that America is fighting Britain’s war.
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BETWEEN allies there must be equality, or as near equality as we can get. If we are criticized, we must be given the power of reply. On March 11, 1944, the Tulsa Tribune said: “We will work together and fight together if England is smart enough to let us. Anti-British feeling is made in England and not here. The way to stop it is to stop the English from messing in our political business. . . . The English have always been a parasitic people. They have always lived off of others. . . . Smart England flung her red belt of Empire round the world to sap the substance from other lands to feed England and maintain her titled classes. . . . The Atlantic Charter is nothing to England. ... It was never anything but fourth term propaganda endorsed by Churchill. ... In England a boy is born to be a butler. . . . There is no Log Cabin to 10 Downing Street. . . . The English are notoriously an illmannered lot. . . . We want to be England’s friend. . . . We want England to be friendly with us and help us. . . . We have no desire to meddle in their politics but the insolent English are very busy right now telling us who we should elect to handle our domestic affairs. . . . We are democratic. . . . England is not democratic. . . . England wants us to keep Roosevelt because it is her guess he has committed us to favors to England and England cannot long live without favors. . . .”
It would destroy that writer’s argument somewhat, I suppose, were he to concede that our former Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, began life in a stone cottage at Lossiemouth, or that Herbert Morrison is a policeman’s son; or that ours is the Mother of Parliaments; or that the Monroe Doctrine was always underwritten by the British Navy - — although the Americans were never told so. (Walter Lippmann makes the point in his book U. S. Foreign Policy.)
It is not easy to know what to do with attacks of this sort, which can bring no displeasure to Dr. Goebbels. But I do not think they should be ignored. My own view is that the English should hit back, and hit hard — fairly, but hard. When we do not, you are encouraged to believe we have no answer, that our conscience is bad and our case is bad. Neither is the fact. When we are gentle we strike you as furtive.
If you attack us on India, I can see no reason why we should not remind you of your Negro problem. When you say we are not democratic, you might be called on to recollect that, at all events, every British subject of voting age in Britain can vote but that hundreds of thousands of your own citizens cannot. Americans may resent these retorts, but I humbly suggest that you had better get used to them. Boxers who give punches must expect to take some in return, and to keep their tempers when doing so.
We British need to copy three things from you — warm friendliness, frankness, toughness. Our appeasement of America leads you to feel you are very noble to be fighting in Europe, that it is our war you are engaged in once more, that these awful English have taken you for a ride for a second time, and that when the fighting is done you will be well entitled to withdraw once again to your mountaintop, then to look down, cold and aloof, on a hideous, mad world. If that is to be so, if a majority of the American people emerge from this war holding that view and acting on it, then, in due course and in the devil’s time, this monstrous task in which my son and yours are now engaged will have to be done all over again.