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HOUSE OF COMMONS
17th April 1945
The Greatest
Champion of Freedom
My friendship with the great man to
whose work and fame we pay our tribute today began and ripened during
this war. I had met him, but only for a few minutes, after the close
of the last war, and as soon as I went to the Admiralty in September
1939, he telegraphed, inviting me to correspond with him direct on
naval or other matters if at any time I felt inclined. Having
obtained the permission of the Prime Minister, I did so. Knowing
President Roosevelt's keen interest in sea warfare, I furnished him
with a stream of information about our naval affairs, and about the
various actions, including especially the action of the Plate River,
which lighted the first gloomy winter of the war.
When I became Prime Minister, and the war broke
out in all its hideous fury, when our own life and survival hung in
the balance, I was already in a position to telegraph to the
President on terms of an association which had become most intimate
and, to me most agreeable. This continued through all the ups and
downs of the world struggle until Thursday last, when I received my
last messages from him These messages showed no falling-off in his
accustomed clear vision and vigour upon perplexing and complicated
matters. I may mention that this correspondence which, of course, was
greatly increased after the United States' entry into the war,
comprises, to and fro between us, over 1700 messages. Many of these
were lengthy messages, and the majority dealt with those difficult
points which come to be discussed upon the level of Heads of
Governments only after official solutions have not been reached at
other stages. To this correspondence there must be added our nine
meetings - at Argentina, three in Washington, at Casablanca, at
Teheran, two at Quebec and, last of all, at Yalta, comprising in all
about 120 days of close personal contact, during a great part of
which I stayed with him at the White House, or at his home at Hyde
Park or in his retreat in the Blue Mountains, which he called
'Shangri-la'.
I conceived an admiration for him as a
statesman, a man of affairs, and a war leader. I felt the utmost
confidence in his upright, inspiring character and outlook, and a
personal regard and affection I must say &emdash; for him beyond my
power to express today. His love of his own country, his respect for
its constitution, his power of gauging the tides and currents of its
mobile public opinion, were always evident, but added to these were
the beatings of that generous heart which was always stirred to anger
and to action by spectacles of aggression and oppression by the
strong against the weak. It is, indeed, a loss - a bitter loss to
humanity - that those heart-beats are stilled for ever.
President Roosevelt's physical affliction lay
heavily upon him. It was a marvel that he bore up against it through
all the many years of tumult and storm. Not one man in ten millions,
stricken and crippled as he was, would have attempted to plunge into
a life of physical and mental exertion and of hard, ceaseless
political controversy. Not one in ten millions would have tried, not
one in a generation would have succeeded, not only in entering this
sphere, not only in acting vehemently in it, but in becoming
indisputable master of the scene. In this extraordinary effort of the
spirit over the flesh, of will-power over physical infirmity, he was
inspired and sustained by that noble woman his devoted wife, whose
high ideals marched with his own, and to whom the deep and respectful
sympathy of the House of Commons flows out today in all
fullness.
There is no doubt that the President foresaw
the great dangers closing in upon the prewar world with far more
prescience than most well-informed people on either side of the
Atlantic, and that he urged forward with all his power such
precautionary military preparations as peace-time opinion in the
United States could be brought to accept. There never was a moment's
doubt, as the quarrel opened, upon which side his sympathies lay. The
fall of France, and what seemed to most people outside this Island
the impending destruction of Great Britain, were to him an agony
although he never lost faith in us. They were an agony to him not
only on account of Europe, but because of the serious perils to which
the United States herself would have been exposed had we been
overwhelmed or the survivors cast down under the German yoke. The
bearing of the British nation at that time of stress, when we were
all alone, filled him and vast numbers of his countrymen with the
warmest sentiments towards our people. He and they felt the blitz of
the stern winter of 1940&emdash;41, when Hitler set himself to rub
out the cities of our country, as much as any of us did, and perhaps
more indeed, for imagination is often more torturing than reality.
There is no doubt that the bearing of the British and, above all, of
the Londoners, kindled fires in American bosoms far harder to quench
than the conflagrations from which we were suffering. There was also
at that time, in spite of General Wavell's victories &emdash; all the
more, indeed, because of the reinforcements which were sent from this
country to him &emdash; the apprehension widespread in the United
States that we should be invaded by Germany after the fullest
preparation in the spring of 1941. It was in February that the
President sent to England the late Mr Wendell Willkie, who, although
a political rival and an opposing candidate, felt as he did on many
important points. Mr Willkie brought a letter from Mr Roosevelt,
which the President had written in his own hand, and this letter
contained the famous lines of Longfellow:...
Sail on, 0 ship of
State!
Sail on, 0 Union,
strong and great!
Humanity with all its
fears,
with all the hopes of
future years,
Is hanging breathless
on thy fate!
At about that same time he devised
the extraordinary measure of assistance called Lend-Lease, which will
stand forth as the most unselfish and unsordid financial act of any
country in all history. The effect of this was greatly to increase
British fighting power, and for all the purposes of the war effort to
make us, as it were, a much more numerous community. In that autumn I
met the President for the first time during the war at Argentina in
Newfoundland, and together we drew up the Declaration which has since
been called the Atlantic Charter, and which will, I trust, long
remain a guide for both our peoples and for other peoples of the
world. All this time, in deep and dark and deadly secrecy, the
Japanese were preparing their act of treachery and greed. When next
we met in Washington, Japan, Germany and Italy had declared war upon
the United States, and both our countries were in arms, shoulder to
shoulder. Since then we have advanced over the land and over the sea
through many difficulties and disappointments, but always with a
broadening measure of success.
I need not dwell upon the series of great
operations which have taken place in the Western Hemisphere, to say
nothing of that other immense war proceeding on the other side of the
world. Nor need I speak of the plans which we made with our great
Ally, Russia, at Teheran, for these have now been carried out for all
the world to see. But at Yalta I noticed that the President was
ailing. His captivating smile, his gay and charming manner, had not
deserted him, but his face had a transparency, an air of
purification, and often there was a faraway look in his eyes.
When I took my leave of him in Alexandria
harbour I must confess that I had an indefinable sense of fear that
his health and his strength were on the ebb. But nothing altered his
inflexible sense of duty. To the end he faced his innumerable tasks
unflinching. One of the tasks of the President is to sign maybe a
hundred or two State papers with his own hand every day, commissions
and so forth. All this he continued to carry out with the utmost
strictness. When death came suddenly upon him 'he had finished his
mail.' That portion of his day's work was done. As the saying goes,
he died in harness, and we may well say in battle harness, like his
soldiers, sailors, and airmen, who side by side with ours are
carrying on their task to the end all over the world. What an
enviable death was his! He had brought his country through the worst
of its perils and the heaviest of its toils. Victory had cast its
sure and steady beam upon him. In the days of peace he had broadened
and stabilised the foundations of American life and union. In war he
had raised the strength, might and glory of the great Republic to a
height never attained by any nation in history. With her left hand
she was leading the advance of the conquering Allied Armies into the
heart of Germany, and with her right, on the other side of the globe,
she was irresistibly and swiftly breaking up the power of Japan. And
all the time ships, munitions, supplies and food of every kind were
aiding on a gigantic scale her Allies, great and small, in the course
of the long struggle.
But all this was no more than worldly power and
grandeur, had it not been that the causes of human freedom and of
social justice, to which so much of his life had been given, added a
lustre to this power and pomp and warlike might, a lustre which will
long be discernible among men. He has left behind him a band of
resolute and able men handling the numerous interrelated parts of the
vast American war machine. He has left a successor who comes forward
with firm step and sure conviction to carry on the task to its
appointed end. For us, it remains only to say that in Franklin
Roosevelt there died the greatest American friend we have ever known,
and the greatest champion of freedom who has ever brought help and
comfort from the new world to the old.
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