by Ian Kershaw
The range of views on offer among the President’s closest advisers, from the wily caution of Hull to the forthright interventionism of Stimson, enabled Roosevelt to oscillate between options as he chose. Hull was one of the select few able to see the President more or less at will. Given his position, this was essential. But there was little personal empathy. Immediate access did not extend a great deal further. Only Stimson, Welles and, especially, Roosevelt’s long-standing most trusted adviser, Harry Hopkins–his New Dealer ‘Mr Fixit’, who had been in his close entourage since the beginning, had his ear on most matters, even had an apartment in the White House, and was decried by opponents as a combination of Machiavelli, Svengali and Rasputin–had near-automatic access to the President and were most directly exposed to his thinking. Hopkins, chain-smoking, gaunt and in frail health after a life-threatening illness, but with an undiminished liking for horse racing and nightclubs, indefatigable, straight-talking with a knack of cutting to the heart of any issue, and utterly loyal to Roosevelt with ‘an extrasensory perception’ of his moods, became an indispensable conduit for those in the inner circle who urgently sought to gain the President’s ear.112
This group–Stimson and Knox, their uniformed heads of the services, Stark and Marshall, Hull and Hopkins–now started to be brought together increasingly at the White House. Stimson dubbed the group the ‘War Council’. It was the closest approximation to the Defence Committee of the British War Cabinet, and the nearest Roosevelt came to an institutionalized framework for taking decisions in matters of national security. However, Roosevelt made sure the group did not ossify into a formal bureaucracy. He retained the flexibility to intervene or oversee wherever he wanted, depending on the issue. ‘All the threads of policy’, it has been said with justification, ‘led ultimately to the White House.’113
Roosevelt’s difficulties were not in ensuring that his chosen line would be adopted by his advisers. Whether they were hardliners or more ‘dovish’, they acceded, if sometimes in frustration, to Roosevelt’s often hesitant policy choices. The President’s difficulties lay, as always, with the reception of his actions in Congress and, beyond Capitol Hill, among wider public opinion and its organized lobbies. And here, Roosevelt remained ultracautious. Congress still had Democratic majorities in both chambers. But the mid-term elections of 1938 had substantially strengthened the basis of opposition to Roosevelt. Alignment on key committees of conservative Democrats, mainly from the southern states, with Republicans could make life difficult for the President. In particular, the vocal isolationist minority, backed by important press outlets (most notably the influential daily, the Chicago Tribune) and lobbies, was able to tap far wider sentiment, sympathetic to the plight of the west European democracies, but opposed to American involvement in the war. Lobby groups, for and against intervention, exploited the mood and gained a good deal of backing–and financial support.
As the presidential election campaign gathered momentum across the summer and autumn, an isolationist organization, America First, founded at the beginning of September, heavily weighted towards the Republicans and highly critical of Roosevelt’s foreign policy, saw local groups spring up across the Midwest (where Chicago was the headquarters) and in the north-east. The main theme of their extensive propaganda, pumped home in huge mass meetings, was that Hitler did not endanger the United States and that aid to Britain could only end in American entry into the war in Europe.114 America First had been established as a counter-lobby to the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which was launched in May 1940 and was a presence in every state except North Dakota, advertising widely in the press and on national radio, raising a quarter of a million dollars by July and not stinting in its petitions to the President and Congress. The propaganda from both sides left its mark on opinion. There was a greater readiness to give Britain more material support, but the majority still held to neutrality and isolation.115 The German sweep through the Low Countries and the increasingly precarious position of France and Britain in May 1940 profoundly worried Americans. Polls showed that only about 30 per cent still believed in an Allied victory, while 78 per cent feared that a triumphant Germany would exert influence in South America and 63 per cent thought Hitler would even seize territory on the American continent.116 Worried for their own safety, people were greatly alarmed at the state of American preparedness, but divided on how much the United States should be doing to help the Allies, and massively opposed to any direct involvement in the European conflict.
This was the climate of opinion that Roosevelt had to face in the summer and autumn of 1940. It coincided with a key domestic issue: should Roosevelt stand for re-election for an unprecedented third term in office? And it formed the backcloth to the most critical and contentious issue of defence policy that had so far arisen: should the United States comply with Churchill’s request and support Great Britain’s desperate attempt to hold out against the prospect of German invasion in a tangible way by the sale of fifty destroyers? It was the first of two vital decisions that Roosevelt would make over the coming months. Together, these decisions would reshape the alliance between the United States and Great Britain and pave the way for ever closer cooperation in the struggle against Hitler’s Germany.
IV
On 15 May 1940 Winston Churchill sent his first letter as Prime Minister of what would prove to be a voluminous and vitally important correspondence with Roosevelt. The two had met briefly in 1918. The meeting left more of a mark on Roosevelt than on Churchill (who did not remember it): the future American President recalled the future British Prime Minister as being a ‘stinker’.117 He continued into the Second World War to see Churchill as a social reactionary with old-fashioned ‘Victorian’ views. And he criticized his notorious capacity for alcohol. On hearing of Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister, he said he presumed he was the best man available, even if he was drunk half the time. Churchill, for his part, expressed concern about Roosevelt’s own drinking habits, though in this case it was the President’s taste for mixed dry and sweet vermouth that the British Prime Minister abhorred. More seriously, he had before the war been critical of the prolonged economic recession in the United States, which he attributed to Roosevelt’s clashes with big business. He had been pleased to see the beginnings of American rearmament, limited though they were, but he still harboured doubts about Roosevelt’s commitment to British interests during the spring and summer of 1940.118
The two had exchanged a series of personal letters since the beginning of the European war, when Churchill had been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. Roosevelt had initiated the correspondence on 11 September 1939, with the first of what would amount to almost two thousand letters and memoranda exchanged during the next five and a half years.119 Probably, Roosevelt viewed this early correspondence as a way of keeping a personal conduit, alongside official channels, open to the British government once war had begun in Europe.120 Churchill’s interest was simple and unvarnished: ‘it was a good thing to feed [Roosevelt] at intervals,’ he told the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax.121 From unpropitious beginnings, the correspondence would help to build a personal rapport between Roosevelt and Churchill which would prove to be of inestimable value in forging the bonds between the United States and Great Britain in 1940–41, eventually turning into a fully fledged war alliance. But there was still a very long way to go when Churchill dispatched his letter to the American President on 15 May 1940.
Churchill began by painting the dismal scene in western Europe where, in the wake of the German advance, ‘the small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood’. He expected Mussolini to join in ‘to share the loot of civilisation’. And he envisaged an attack on Britain in the near future. Britain, he said, would fight on alone, if necessary. ‘But I trust you realise, Mr. President,’ he continued, ‘that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe estab
lished with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.’ He then came to the point of his letter: his shopping list. ‘All I ask now is that you should proclaim non-belligerency, which would mean that you would help us with everything short of actually engaging armed forces. Immediate needs are, first of all, the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers to bridge the gap between what we have now and the large new construction we put in hand at the beginning of the war.’ He added, for good measure, that Britain also wanted ‘several hundred of the latest types of aircraft’, along with anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition, steel and other materials. Britain would continue to pay in dollars as long as possible, he wrote, but ‘I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more you will give us the stuff all the same’.122
The letter lost nothing in forthrightness. It reflected the hope, rather than certainty, running through the leadership of the British government that the United States would not let Britain sink, and that ‘when our dollars and gold run out there will be no difficulty about credits or gifts’.123 There were no illusions in Whitehall about the significance of such aid. On 25 May, outlining their contingency planning in the event of a collapse of France, the British chiefs of staff stated their assumption that the United States ‘is willing to give us full economic and financial support, without which we do not think we could continue the war with any chance of success’.124 There were already hopes that America would go still further. By mid-June there was wide agreement that what Britain needed was an immediate declaration of war by the United States. A minority view, however, was that the supply of surplus materials by the United States, including destroyers, would probably make her entry into the war and the sending of an American Expeditionary Force to Europe unnecessary.125
Aid in order to keep America out of the European war, not draw her in, was increasingly the presumption of the Roosevelt administration. But even that stance ran ahead of public opinion at the time. In May 1940 only 35 per cent of those questioned in opinion polls favoured aid to Britain and France at the risk of American involvement.126 For Roosevelt, Churchill’s request of 15 May was asking too much too soon. To comply with it was to take a gamble, first with public opinion and, secondly, with those in the administration who advocated waiting to see how the battle for France would turn out. Could American aid, even if it were to be given, be provided in time? Was there not the grave danger that it would simply be swallowed up in the defeat about to envelop not just France but, it seemed, most likely Britain as well? The American ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, pessimistic to the point of being defeatist, advised caution. On 15 May he reported the impression he had gleaned from Churchill that Britain would be attacked within a month. He thought the United States was in danger of ‘holding the bag for a war in which the Allies expect to be beaten’, and advised ‘that if we had to fight to protect our lives, we would do better fighting in our own back yard’.127 George Marshall, the chief of staff, argued that accommodating the British would severely weaken American hemispheric defence. Only limited armaments could in any case be made available.128 And Roosevelt himself had it on what he took to be good authority that Hitler was likely to make Britain an offer of settlement based upon the surrender of British colonies, and–even more importantly–the fleet.129
The President’s immediate reply to Churchill’s request, received in Whitehall on 18 May, was, accordingly, kind in tone but non-committal in content. While he would do what he could to facilitate the provision of equipment (and indeed he had hastily taken the decision to scrape together every available warplane to send to France, little though it amounted to130), the request for the loan or gift of the forty or fifty destroyers was turned down flat. There were legal as well as political obstacles. And the Navy Department opposed the release of any ships when national security was of such paramount importance.131 The President’s reply was couched in these terms. The loan or gift of the destroyers, he wrote, would require the authorization of Congress. He indicated that this was unlikely to be forthcoming at the time. Moreover, the destroyers were needed to patrol American waters. In any case, they could not be transferred in time to make a difference in the battle for Europe. The plea for a declaration of non-belligerence was blithely ignored.132
There the matter of the destroyers rested for the time being. But not for long. Events in western Europe, unfolding at such a frightening pace, were concentrating American minds, in the White House as well as outside. Strong and widespread opposition to American intervention in the war was still the most profound feature of public opinion at the end of May 1940. According to an opinion poll published on 29 May, only 7.7 per cent of the population favoured entering the war immediately. The figure rose to 19 per cent in favour of intervention if the defeat of the Allies seemed inevitable. But 40 per cent opposed American participation under any circumstances.133 A despairing plea by the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, that the United States immediately declare war and act by sending its Atlantic fleet to European waters, could in this climate only fall upon deaf ears, even had the President been more temperamentally disposed towards direct American intervention than was the case.134 It would be many months before American opinion became attuned to the prospect of the country at war once again. Even so, opinion was soon shifting. With Americans glued to their radio sets, listening to the news of daily disaster from Europe, the fall of France and the imminent threat to Great Britain sharpened awareness of the menace to the United States from German domination of the Atlantic. Isolationist feeling was weakening, even in the Midwest heartlands. A sign of this was the rapidly increasing backing for the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, the pressure group recently founded by William Allen White, a publisher and former supporter of the neutrality legislation, aimed at mobilizing opinion in favour of an interventionist stance.135 When, on 10 June 1940, the day that Italy joined the war, Roosevelt announced that the United States would ‘extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation’ as well as mobilizing American defence, he was doing no more than articulating the public mood.136 Four out of five Americans polled in June were in favour of giving more material support to Britain, and two-thirds, recognizing where this might lead, thought the United States would enter the war at some stage.137
There was also now massive support, reaching even into previously hardcore isolationist circles, for rapid and wholesale rearmament. Congress backed the President’s requests that amounted to a fivefold increase in defence spending in 1940, granting a total of $10.5 billion, a figure unthinkable only a year earlier.138 But productive capacity was still low. The big dividends from rearmament would only show by 1942. And the question of how much and what to send to Britain, isolated and imperilled after the fall of France, was one that tended to divide, rather than unite, policy-makers. The question of the destroyers, of which the public was still ignorant, had been shelved. But it would not go away.
Churchill had responded to Roosevelt, immediately on receipt of his letter, expressing his understanding of, though regret at, the decision not to provide the destroyers. The battle for France was still raging, and Churchill, in a previous note, had already stated that if American assistance was to play any part in the struggle, it had to come soon. Now he pointed out in bleak terms the ‘nightmare’ that would arise from the defeat of Britain. ‘If members of the present Administration were finished,’ he wrote, ‘and others came in to parley amid the ruins, you must not be blind to the fact that the sole remaining bargaining counter with Germany would be the Fleet, and if this country was left by the United States to its fate no one would have the right to blame those then responsible if they made the best terms they could for the surviving inhabitants.’139 Roosevelt sent no immediate reply. But the point struck home. Speaking shortly afterwards to business leaders, the President pointed out that if the British fleet and the French army were removed, ‘there is nothing between the Americas and those new forces in Europ
e’.140 Soon, the French army was indeed removed from the equation. Under the terms of the armistice with Germany, the French navy was left intact and based in north Africa, to be ‘demobilised and disarmed under German or Italian control’.141 The danger that the Germans would expropriate it was obvious. That left the British navy. Everything possible had to be done to prevent that falling into German hands. Thought was already being given to spiriting it across the Atlantic, to Canada, should Britain fall. But, more immediately, the navy was vital to Britain’s chances of surviving a German invasion. In the confines of British coastal waters, the most crucial warship was the destroyer. And of a hundred or so destroyers available in home waters at the beginning of the war, almost half had been lost or damaged.142 If American destroyers could help keep Britain in the war, the value to the United States would be incalculable. If, however, they were loaned to Britain and then lost to the Germans, they would simply be an unnecessary gift to the enemy, increasing the menace to America.143 This was the dilemma of the Roosevelt administration when the issue of the loan of destroyers to Britain surfaced again in July 1940.
