From Masters and Commanders (Andrew Roberts, 2008) pp 513,525
Churchill seemed in a good mood at II a.m. on Tuesday 5 September [1944] in the saloon car of his train on the way up to the Clyde, where he was going to board the Queen Mary. Cunningham reckoned that ‘If he keeps up his present attitude things should go well in Quebec and it will be what the Americans called “a love feast”. But it takes little to rouse his vengeful temper and he will do anything then to get the better of our allies.” At 5 p.m. Churchill called Cunningham back to the saloon to say that there was a rumour that Germany had capitulated, and what if, two days out to sea, it proved to be true? ‘The only thing to do was to turn the ship round and come back,’ replied the First Sea Lord. On board the great liner, Which sailed from Greenock for Halifax, Nova Scotia, that night, were Winston and Clementine Churchill, Brooke, Portal, Cunningham, Leathers, Cherwell, Ismay, Hollis and Colville.
As the Prime Minister crossed the Atlantic, the President was attending a meeting at the White House to discuss Henry Morgenthau’s extraordinary plan to deindustrialize post-war Germany. ‘There is no reason why Germany couldn’t go back to 1810,’ expounded Roosevelt at some length, ‘where they would be perfectly comfortable but wouldn’t have any luxury.’ In fact 1810 saw the German Confederation dominated by Napoleon, with Prussia still seething with revanchism after her humiliation at Jena-Auerstadt, but the general point was made. Roosevelt’s reverie of a defanged Teutonic rural idyll was darkened only by the idea that Britain might be the ultimate beneficiary of the lack of competition from German iron and steel manufacturers. Discussing the Saar and the Ruhr, with Hopkins and Morgenthau arguing on one side and Stimson and Hull on the other, it was ‘a very unsatisfactory meeting’, as Roosevelt worried ‘that the English would have the advantage of the steel business if the Ruhr were closed’ and consequently ‘he had the idea that this thing was good for England? The assumption that that could therefore not also be good for the United States shows how far Roosevelt’s thinking had come since the Riviera and Arcadia conferences.
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(525)
That same day [Sep 15] Roosevelt and Churchill, amazingly enough, initialled the Morgenthau Plan, which said that Germany needed to be turned ‘into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in character’. Brooke was fundamentally opposed, already seeing Germany as a future ‘ally to meet the Russian threat of twenty-five years hence?” Considering that twenty-five years after writing that in 1944, West Germany was an integral part of NATO and Russia had just crushed the Prague Spring, Brooke was more acute than either Roosevelt or Churchill at the time. Once Churchill had properly examined the plan, which amounted to an agricultural Treaty of Versailles and would have hardly allowed a fraction of Germany’s population to survive on her own territory, he rightly denounced it as ‘unnatural, unchristian and unnecessary’.
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