‘Beware the British Serpent! Once more a boa constrictor – “Perfidious Albion” – is crawling across the American landscape, spewing forth its unctuous lies.’
(Poster observed on walls in Chicago, September 1939)
If psychiatry has any use at all, then perhaps it will one day discover why so many British people have come to believe in a benevolent and sweet-natured ‘special relationship’ with the USA which does not exist. Not only is there no such thing, there is a case for saying that the USA has often singled this country out for exceptionally harsh treatment.
This fantasy, a national delusion that we possess an imaginary friend, began in 1940 when Britain, forced back to its home islands by total military defeat, wondered what to do next. The former Ruler of the Waves was bankrupt, incapable of returning to the Continent from which it had been expelled yet saved by the sea from invasion or subjugation. Its government knew that, without new allies, Britain would eventually have to make some sort of peace with Hitler. We lacked the power or the wealth to cross the Channel and reverse Dunkirk by ourselves. If Hitler could either overcome or permanently neutralise the USSR, warlike morale would eventually fail in a country heavily rationed, frequently bombed and without hope of ultimate victory. And then what ghastly terms might we have to make? Winston Churchill’s far-sighted decision to refuse any sort of peace offer in 1940 (and Clive Ponting and others have pointed out that such an offer almost certainly was made or at least hinted at, repeatedly, through both Switzerland and Sweden) was based on a hope that the USA could be drawn into the war by skilful diplomacy and propaganda.
Churchill can have had few illusions about the USA, being more familiar with that country than most British politicians. He would have known that much of its population was indifferent to Britain’s fate, that many – especially Irish-Americans and German-Americans – were actively hostile to Britain.
This truth had been partly tested in the last prewar summer by the strange visit of King George VI and his queen to Canada and the USA. Both Roosevelt and the Chamberlain government (and the Canadian premier, Mackenzie King) felt that something needed to be done to improve relations between the two great English-speaking naval powers. No doubt they envisaged a watering-down of the Neutrality Acts, which blocked American military aid to Britain. They sought the lessening of the resentment many Americans felt over Britain’s behaviour in the Great War, and its default on its debts afterwards. Millions of Americans still believed that cynical propaganda had lured the USA into a war that was none of its business in 1917. None of them, at the time, could have guessed that within a year of the royal visit, France would have fallen and Britain would have ceased to be an arrogant imperial rival and become a supplicant.
In the autumn of 1938, when the royal visit was officially announced, the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (the inspiration for Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane) broadcast on the ABC radio network about England’s ‘selfishness’ and ‘perfidy’. He accused the British of pouring soft soap over the head, ears and eyes of Uncle Sam, ‘who is so sought after when needed and so scoffed at in the intervening times’.1 In a Senate debate in January 1939, Senator Robert Rice Reynolds spoke of the king and queen coming to the USA to ‘curry favour with the United States, all of them on bended knee, if not literally so, figuratively so, for the purpose of asking the United States, the people of America, again to save them’.2 Senator Reynolds was the sort of man who we would now call an ‘isolationist’. But presumably he viewed himself as an American patriot defending his country’s interest and following George Washington’s policy of avoiding foreign entanglements. He used the same speech to complain that Britain and France did not recognise America’s part in winning the Great War, and refused to admit they owed money to the USA. This was not, at the time, a particularly unusual or fringe opinion on Capitol Hill. Nor was it unusual in the USA as a whole, especially in the Midwest and among Irish-Americans and German-Americans. In a 1937 Gallup poll, 70 per cent of Americans said they thought it had been a mistake for the USA to enter the Great War. This was not just a sentiment among the poor and ill-educated. Ernest Hemingway had written in 1935, ‘We were fools to be sucked in once in a European war, and we shall never be sucked in again.’3 In September 1939, posters were observed in Chicago bearing the words ‘Beware the British Serpent! Once more a boa constrictor – “Perfidious Albion” – is crawling across the American landscape, spewing forth its unctuous lies.’4 The royal visit, when it came, was highly successful within reasonable limits – not least because the young king and queen democratically did eat hot dogs at a picnic at Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home on the Hudson River. The informal meal (even though the queen used a knife and fork) dispelled some of the resentment at British snobbery and aloofness felt by so many Americans. But it still did not lead to an immediate conversion of President Roosevelt or the American people to the cause of helping Britain. The king and queen were a pleasant young couple, but that did not mean that Americans, with their own concerns and their faint, amused scorn for what they saw as Britain’s archaic form of government, were prepared to die, or even spend hard cash, for Britain’s sake. Roosevelt must also have been greatly struck by the king’s remarks to him, in late-night conversations, about Winston Churchill. These were recorded by Canada’s Mackenzie King (who himself regarded Churchill as ‘one of the most dangerous men I have ever known’).5 George VI told the president that he very much held the Gallipoli disaster against Churchill, and would not wish to appoint him to any high office ‘unless it was absolutely necessary in time of war’.6
American suspicion of British ingratitude and trickery had its sour counterpart in London. Neville Chamberlain had grown tired of windy American moralising about appeasement in Europe, of which there was much. He thought this sat awkwardly alongside America’s meagre response to pleas for help with rearmament. He had said some years before, ‘It is always best and safest to count on nothing from the Americans but words.’ This seems to have remained his view, and that of many in British politics, Winston Churchill being a very rare exception. Who was really right?
It is a significant fact in itself that Lynne Olson’s book Those Angry Days, which explains why such feelings were common, has never been published or reviewed or, as far as I can discover, even mentioned in the media of Great Britain. Ms Olson is not unknown in Britain, and her 2017 book Last Hope Island, about continental refugees aiding Britain’s war against Hitler, was a considerable critical success in the UK. Those Angry Days might not have appealed so much, though its subject is of great interest to British readers. Its account of the neutralist ‘America First’ movement, of American military weakness in 1940, and of the feebleness and duplicity of Franklin Roosevelt in this era, would astonish British people brought up on the ‘special relationship’ and stories about how Britain and the USA fought ‘shoulder to shoulder’.
Roosevelt repeatedly pledged that he would not enter a European war, and that he would not send American soldiers to fight in it. He would have destroyed his presidency had he said anything else, but he went further than he needed to. It is hard to believe that he did not, in fact, mean what he said. On 3 September 1939, after the British and French declarations of war, he proclaimed, ‘I hope the United States will keep out of this war. I believe that it will. And I give you assurance and reassurance that every effort of your government will be directed to that end.’
He was indecisive and clumsy in efforts to help France and Britain rearm in face of the war that the Polish guarantee had made inevitable. He was equally slow to arm the USA, the supposed arsenal of democracy, for any coming fight. In 1939, six years after Roosevelt had come to office, the US Army, long starved of funds by Congress, was ranked 17th in the armies of the world, between Portugal and Bulgaria. It was described by Life magazine at the time as ‘the smallest, worst-equipped armed force of any major power’.
In August 1940, just after attending US Army manoeuvres, Roosevelt told a White House press conference that American soldiers ‘would have been licked by thoroughly trained forces […] within a day or two’, dwelling on their poor training and physical condition.7 A year before, the German military attaché in Washington, General Friedrich von Boetticher, had reported to Berlin that ‘there was not the slightest indication of [the US] preparing for war.’8 Von Boetticher knew what he was talking about. He was popular with senior American officers, many of them sympathetic to Germany and cool towards Britain, and had been allowed extraordinary freedom to tour military bases, research installations and aircraft factories all over the USA.
The US Navy was a major fleet, generally well officered and efficient, but many of its ships were elderly survivors of World War I. And in any case, as Kaiser Wilhelm II had observed in 1914 (laughing at his own joke as he did so), ‘Dreadnoughts have no wheels.’ American naval power, however great, could do little to restrain German land power in Europe. Hitler’s generally mocking attitude towards Roosevelt’s pronouncements and warnings was based on knowledge of the Great Republic’s true strength. What he did not grasp – for nobody, including Roosevelt, did at the time – was that the USA had an enormous ability to create huge military forces at high speed.
As for the ‘unsordid’ programme of Lend-Lease, it is greatly overrated. By the middle of 1941, little of the cash allocated for the programme had been spent. About 2 per cent of it had actually reached Britain in the form of supplies by the summer of 1941 – and that took the shape not of tanks, guns and aircraft, but of dried egg, canned meat and beans. In July of that year William Whitney, a Lend-Lease official posted to London, resigned in protest at the programme’s failure. He complained, ‘We are deceiving the people on both sides of the Atlantic by allowing them to think that there is today a stream of lease-lend war materiels crossing the Atlantic, when in fact there is little or none.’9
There was good political reasoning behind America’s neutrality. War was deeply unpopular in large and important areas of the USA, and Roosevelt had an election to win in November 1940. This contest could easily have ended Britain’s hopes of rescue forever. The Republican Party could have nominated an anti-war candidate hostile to Britain (such as Thomas Dewey or Robert Taft, the favourites). Such a candidate might easily have won. Had this happened, it is hard to see how Britain could have held out very much longer. In fact, the Republicans’ wholly surprising choice of the extraordinary Wendell Willkie in June 1940 is one of the oddest and most surprising events in modern American history. It amazed experienced politicians. But it reduced the pressure on Roosevelt. The date of the Republican Convention, which took place in Philadelphia in oppressive heat at the end of June 1940, had much to do with Willkie’s unexpected nomination. France had just fallen. Even the most complacent Americans had been shocked by the German capture of Paris two weeks earlier and the sombre newsreel pictures which had soon followed. They had never imagined that things were so serious. The belief that the USA might be next, in fact unjustified by any German plans, began to grow in American minds. Secretly and slowly, Roosevelt began to plan for some sort of European intervention. His opponents sought to sabotage his schemes by leaking them to anti-war newspapers. This was extremely dangerous behaviour. In a strange irony, the one thing that might have caused Hitler to turn his wrath away from Russia and towards Britain in 1941 was the December 1941 leak, in two anti-Roosevelt newspapers (the Anglophobic Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune and Washington Times-Herald), of the ‘Victory Plan’. This was a highly accurate account of secret blueprints for a US invasion of German-occupied Europe, pencilled in for 1943. The plan had been leaked to McCormick by Senator Burton Wheeler, an isolationist opponent of US involvement in war. In Berlin it caused a momentary pause in plans to defeat the USSR, and the (fortunately brief) consideration of an alternative plan to march on Britain and deprive the USA of its only realistic base for the planned 1943 invasion.
Luckily for Britain, the bombing of Pearl Harbor intervened just in time. This event persuaded Hitler (mistakenly) that the USA’s attention would now turn wholly eastwards, and he forgot all about invading Britain, this time permanently. Oddly enough, the European invasion plan had been drawn up by Major Albert Wedemeyer, described by Lynne Olson as ‘one of the most isolationist officers in the US Army’, a sympathiser with Germany who would later describe himself as ‘the planner of a war I did not want’.10 He was far from alone among the US military and diplomatic service in disliking the idea of a war against Germany. General Douglas MacArthur, later one of the USA’s pre-eminent wartime commanders, had told General von Boetticher that he thought the Versailles Treaty was a ‘gross injustice’. He believed Germany had every right to expand its army. The Assistant Secretaries of State, Adolf Berle and Breckinridge Long, were antiwar Anglophobes. It sometimes went further even than that. Breckinridge Long also sought to keep Jewish refugees from entering the USA. Eleanor Roosevelt later called him a ‘fascist’.
The extent of pro-German or anti-British sympathies in pre-1941 America is astonishing to those who have grown up since the Roosevelt–Churchill alliance. The Bill to create Lend-Lease was given an anti-British, gloating tinge when it was deliberately awarded the number H. R. 1776. This suggested that coming to the aid of the former proud colonial power, now bankrupt and weak, was a revolutionary act. And so it was. The 1940 debates over Lend-Lease and over the introduction of conscription were besieged by noisy protesters claiming (accurately, as it happened) that Roosevelt, having promised to keep out of war, was secretly planning to sacrifice American boys in a European quarrel.
Suspicion of British propaganda, dating from 1914, vied with sympathy for London and with fear, stirred up by Roosevelt (and indeed by covert British propaganda), that the USA might be next on Hitler’s list. A fist fight over the issue broke out – between Democrats – on the floor of Congress. The pro-intervention Senator Claude Pepper was hanged in effigy from an oak tree on Capitol Hill by a group of respectable ladies in hats and gloves calling themselves a ‘mothers’ committee’. Round his neck was a placard equating him with Benedict Arnold, the archetypal pro-British traitor from the War of Independence. A pro-intervention congressman said he hoped, for the sake of the country, that these fearsome women weren’t really anybody’s mothers.
The ‘America First’ movement, if it is known about at all in Britain, is often dismissed as a kind of pro-Nazi front. It is confused with openly pro-Nazi or Judophobic organisations such as Father Charles Coughlin’s ‘Silver Shirts’, and with unquestionably pro-Berlin bodies such as the German-American Bund. It certainly drew support from such quarters. But it also contained such figures as Kingman Brewster Jr, then a Yale undergraduate, one day to be US ambassador to the Court of St James’s. ‘America First’ began very respectably at Yale and was, to begin with, a student movement, embracing many young and idealistic men who regarded another war as a cynical horror, whipped up by dishonest propaganda. This was what the 1914 war seemed to them to have been. The future president Gerald Ford and JFK’s elder brother Joe also gave their endorsement. Among its early supporters was Norman Thomas, leader of the American Socialist Party. Only later did it become a largely Midwestern and conservative grouping.
Had it not been for the nomination of Wendell Willkie as Republican presidential candidate, and had it not been for the Fall of France during the crucial months of the presidential campaign, the USA might have remained wholly disarmed and aloof from the European conflict until Pearl Harbor. It might have remained aloof even after that. If Hitler had not voluntarily declared war on the USA after Pearl Harbor, it is far from clear that America would ever have become directly involved in the European war. John Kenneth Galbraith told Gitta Sereny many years later,
When Pearl Harbor happened, we [pro-British elements in the US government] were desperate. […] We were all in agony. The mood of the American people was obvious – they were determined that the Japanese had to be punished. We could have been forced to concentrate all our efforts on the Pacific, unable from then on to give more than purely peripheral help to Britain. It was truly astounding when Hitler declared war on us three days later. I cannot tell you our feeling of triumph. It was a totally irrational thing for him to do, and I think it saved Europe.11
But if Wendell Willkie had not defied much of his party by supporting military conscription, the USA would not have been ready to fight Japan either. Willkie’s support for compulsory military service was essential in getting Congress to agree to it. Even more important, in political terms, was his support for the Destroyers for Bases Agreement with Britain.
Few now know the details of this bargain. Winston Churchill had been begging Roosevelt for ships almost since he entered Downing Street. After the Norway campaign and Dunkirk, the Royal Navy had lost a frightening number of its destroyers. Of the 176 destroyers with which Britain had started the war, only 68 were still fit for service in home waters after Dunkirk.12 These vessels were necessary both as escorts for bigger ships and for convoy work. They would have been indispensable if the Germans had ever attempted a cross-Channel invasion, and could not swiftly be replaced by British shipyards. The US Navy still possessed 50 elderly destroyers left over from World War I, but its commanders had declared openly that it needed them for its own purposes. Congress even approved a measure saying that no surplus vessels could be transferred to foreign powers unless the US Navy’s Chief of Naval Operations expressly stated they were not needed to defend the USA.13 Pro-British lobbyists in the USA thought they could overcome this by persuading the retired general John Pershing, honoured and universally respected commander of America’s Great War expeditionary force, to support the transfer. Pershing, by then 79, obliged handsomely, going on national radio to say,
I am telling you tonight before it is too late that the British Navy needs destroyers to convoy merchant ships, hunt submarines and repel invasion. We have an immense reserve of destroyers left over from the other war … If there is anything we can do to save the British fleet, we shall be failing in our duty to America if we do not.14
But the newspaper proprietor Colonel McCormick, a real soldier who had served as an artillery officer and seen action under Pershing, did not agree with his former commanding officer. He riposted by declaring through his Chicago Tribune that such a transfer would be an act of war. Roosevelt was afraid of McCormick and his fellow isolationists, but two things shifted the balance. Pro-British lawyers produced an opinion saying the president had no need to consult Congress over such a transfer, if it was vital to the defence of the USA, which General Pershing said that it might be. And Roosevelt, with typical cunning, decided to link the handover to the transfer of British bases in the Caribbean and Western Atlantic to US control.
In fact, during the Fall of France, when British defeat looked likely and when many in Washington hourly expected a British surrender, the USA had first proposed that Washington might lease British airfields in Trinidad, Bermuda and Newfoundland (at that time not part of Canada). Churchill rejected the suggestion unless there was an immediate quid pro quo. An American grant of ammunition and obsolescent small arms was not enough. Churchill wanted destroyers. This was not going to be easy, given the divisions and resentments in US public opinion. This was why the idea of an exchange rather than a gift outright was politically necessary. In the end, by presenting it as such an exchange, Roosevelt made a deal possible.
The anti-British element in the USA had long wanted to secure a symbolic British retreat from territory on the Western side of the Atlantic. This was something Robert McCormick’s influential Chicago Tribune had been demanding for many years as recompense for Britain’s failure to pay its war debts. He and his allies also saw this as a chance to humiliate the British, always a personal goal for McCormick. For he viewed the British ruling class as chilly and superior snobs, an attitude probably originating in a nasty few boyhood years at Ludgrove, a British private school, one more piece of evidence that Britain’s private boarding schools have an influence on world events far beyond their size. Ludgrove was once attacked by a distinguished former pupil, Alistair Horne, as a den of ‘humbug, snobbery and unchecked bullying’.15 (No doubt those days are long over; the school is nowadays favoured by the Royal Family.) It had certainly not fostered a spirit of warm love for all things British in the young McCormick.
Roosevelt calculated correctly that, if the gift of the destroyers was conditional on Britain actually publicly withdrawing from sovereign territory, many anti-British figures, such as McCormick, would be ready to accept it.
The agreement contained another interesting stipulation emphasising who was in charge. The elderly ships (made up of three different classes of destroyer) were reclassified as ‘Town Class’, and had to be renamed after US cities which shared their names with towns and cities in Britain or (in a few cases) Canada.
In return for these decrepit vessels, the USA received land in the Bahamas, Jamaica, St Lucia, Trinidad, Antigua and British Guiana on 99-year leases, rent-free. At the same time, though it was not officially part of the swap, the USA was given bases in Newfoundland and in Bermuda. The handover, when it came, was humiliating for the British empire, as cession of sovereignty always is. It was, as perhaps nobody realised at the time, only the beginning of an almost endless series of such handovers as the British empire dwindled in a few short decades from might, majesty, dominion and power to a mere memory. At Argentia in Newfoundland, villagers were ordered from their homes to make way for a US Navy base. Even graves were shifted. The living, also forced to move, said that their compensation was too mean. Even so, they soon found themselves ejected and living in the nearby small town of Placentia. From their new homes they would witness urgent efforts to build what would become for some years the largest US military base outside American territory. Then they would watch the arrival of President Franklin Roosevelt in his new domains, aboard the heavy cruiser USS Augusta in August 1941, an event discussed in detail in Chapter 7.
It is hard to believe that Roosevelt or Churchill were unaware of the significance of the location, a visible and solid symbol of failing British power and America’s response, a curious mixture of spite, patronage and conditional generosity. It was a fitting place to mark the symbolic handing of the imperial sceptre from the failing hands of Winston Churchill to the trembling but eager grasp of Franklin Roosevelt. The events of the next few months, including the bloody and pointless loss of the great ship Prince of Wales, would make this process even more rapid and painful. Yet this symbolism goes oddly unmentioned in accounts of the meeting that followed. Let us in any case return shortly to Newfoundland, to Placentia Bay on that warm August day in 1941 when so much of the modern world’s fate was decided, either by inaction or by action. First, though, it is important to re-examine the heroic months when Britain famously stood alone, and Hitler’s armies reached the English Channel.