Churchill pleads with Roosevelt for old
destroyers, British forces retreat from Dunkirk,
German troops enter Paris.
FOR ROOSEVELT, HITLER’S assault on the Low Countries and France was more evidence that America would not be able to keep out of the war. In a warm letter to King George, he recalled the night they had stayed up late at Hyde Park and he had “seemed pessimistic in my belief in the probability of war. More than a month after that I found the Congress assured that there could be no war, and for a few weeks I had to accept the charge of being a ‘calamity-howler’,” he wrote. “I certainly do not rejoice in my prophecies, but at least it has given me opportunity to bring home the seriousness of the world situation to the type of American who has hitherto believed, in much too large numbers, that no matter what happens there will be little effect on this country.”1
Roosevelt offered a similar message to John Cudahy, US ambassador in Brussels, suggesting that “if the whole of the Mediterranean becomes involved, the good people in this country will wake up to the world situation. They are already beginning to, but have a long way to go.”
On May 13, Churchill gave the first of a series of stirring speeches in the Commons to galvanize support among MPs and the British people. It was a deeply pessimistic message, but delivered in such inspiring terms that it was clear the country had taken a daring and defiant new direction. He said:
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. . . . You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be.2
Although Kennedy was one of Chamberlain’s closest friends, he was at first made welcome in Churchill’s Downing Street. For the new prime minister, even isolationists had their uses when they were the American ambassador and could help speed supplies to Britain. On May 15, after a late-night visit to Churchill, who had “a tray with plenty of liquor on it alongside him and he was drinking a scotch highball, which I felt was indeed not the first one he had drunk that night,” Kennedy wrote to Roosevelt outlining the new prime minister’s game plan: “It was his intention, he said, to ask for whatever airplanes we could spare right now and the loan of 30 or 40 of our old destroyers.” Even if Britain were defeated, Churchill and the government would “never give up so long as he remains in power in public life, even if England were burnt to the ground.” Churchill had told him, “Why, the Government will move, take the fleet with it to Canada, and fight on.”3
Churchill’s first letter to Roosevelt as prime minister, sent by cable and dated May 15, set off a long and anguished exchange in which Churchill eloquently pleaded for help and Roosevelt patiently explained why American opinion, combined with isolationist sentiment in Congress, meant that he could not help as much as he wished. “Although I have changed my office, I am sure you would not wish me to discontinue our intimate private correspondence,” Churchill wrote to Roosevelt. He set out the bleak military prospects facing Britain, with France on the verge of defeat and Mussolini expected to join the war any day.
“If necessary, we shall continue the war alone and we are not afraid of that,” Churchill wrote. “But I trust you realize, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. . . . All I ask now is that you should proclaim nonbelligerency, which would mean that you would help us with everything short of actually engaging armed forces.” He listed Britain’s immediate requirements: “the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers,” “several hundred of the latest types of aircraft,” anti-aircraft batteries and ammunition, and American steel now that Norwegian iron ore supplies were cut off by the German occupation.
With rumors swirling that German paratroops were about to land in the Irish Free State, which neighbored Britain, Churchill asked for “a visit of a United States squadron to Irish ports.” He offered, as if in return, the British naval base in Singapore for the US Pacific Fleet “to keep that Japanese dog quiet.” And he raised the prospect of payment. Kennedy had told Roosevelt that Britain should first liquidate its $2 billion ($33 billion in 2014 terms) in American investments, then liquidate its gold reserves. Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, “We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can, but I should like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, you will give us the stuff all the same.”4 Not since Churchill had written home to his mother from Harrow School had he adopted such a plaintive tone.
Roosevelt disappointed Churchill when he explained that lending the destroyers would need congressional consent and “I am not certain that it would be wise for that suggestion to be made to the Congress at this moment.” Also, “from the standpoint of our own defense requirements” it was doubtful “whether we could dispose even temporarily” of the destroyers he asked for. But the president agreed to supply “the latest type” of warplanes, anti-aircraft equipment, and steel. The other matters he would consider in due course. With the reassuring message that “I hope you will feel free to communicate with me in this way at any time,” he signed off with a cheery if ominous, “The best of luck to you.”5
The German offensive, code-named Sichelschnitt (“Sickle Slash”), pressed on, charging south before turning west to encircle the French, and pinning the British expeditionary force of 300,000 men against the Channel. On May 15, French premier Paul Reynaud6 telephoned Churchill to say, “We are beaten! The road is open to Paris.”7 On May 17, German troops occupied Antwerp and Brussels. Churchill wrote again to Roosevelt saying that he expected Britain to be attacked “on the Dutch model before very long” and that “if American assistance is to play any part it must be available.”8
In the US, there were moves to readjust to the disastrous circumstances unfolding on the Western Front. On May 16, Roosevelt went to Congress to ask in person for $1.4 billion more for “defense.” He was rapturously greeted as he entered the Senate chamber and appeared atypically nervous when he declared, “These are ominous days—days whose swift and shocking developments force every neutral nation to look to its defenses.” Even the old certainties which the isolationists relied upon were made redundant by the speed of the Blitzkrieg. “The Atlantic and Pacific oceans were reasonably adequate defensive barriers when fleets under sail could move at an average speed of five miles an hour,” he said, but “even in those days by a sudden foray it was possible for an opponent actually to burn our national Capitol.”
He warned that technological advances meant an aerial attack on America could be mounted from Greenland, which was only six hours flying time from New England and had been invaded by German troops the previous month, and that “if Bermuda fell into hostile hands it would be a matter of less than three hours for modern bombers to reach our shores.” The European democracies, he argued, had become America’s first line of defense. “I ask the Congress not to take any action which would in any way hamper or delay the delivery of American-made planes to foreign nations which have ordered them, or seek to purchase new planes,” he said.9 Congress leapt to its feet almost to a man and gave the president the longest and most heartfelt ovation of his career. But the warm reception did not mean the isolationists had given up.
Two days later, Grenville Clark,10 a Republican lawyer with whom Roosevelt had worked at the New York white-shoe law firm Carter, Ledyard & Milburn, proposed universal military service, the first peacetime conscription introduced in the history of the republic. “I am inclined to think there is a very strong public opinion for universal service of some kind,” Roosevelt wrote to Clark. “The difficulty of proposing a concrete set of measures ‘short of war’ is largely a political one—what one can get from the Congress.”11
Churchill kept pressing for war supplies. On May 20, he wrote to Roosevelt expressing regret that the president could not send the old destroyers he had requested, for “if they were here in six weeks they would play an invaluable part,” and asking for “the largest possible number of Curtiss P-40 fighters now in course of delivery to your Army.” Despite Churchill’s customary impatience with those immediately around him, which prompted his wife, Clementine, in a rare intervention into his political life, to urge him to curb his “irascibility & rudeness,”12 he always maintained a cordial if sometimes gloomy disposition when dealing with Roosevelt.
The prime minister drew attention to the plight of the British fleet, which kept the Atlantic sea-lanes free, if there was a Nazi victory. “If members of the [British] administration were finished 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 [British] fleet,” he wrote. “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.”
With the help of Henry L. Stimson, Lewis Douglas, Bill Donovan,13 and Judge Robert Patterson, Grenville Clark of the Military Training Camps Association, a World War One veterans group, drafted the Selective Training and Service Bill, which was introduced by Senator Edward Burke of Nebraska and Representative James Wadsworth of New York on June 20.14 It mandated that every male American between twenty-one and thirty-six register for the draft and, through a lottery system, selected 9,000 men to train and serve in the military for twelve months. Ostensibly a measure to protect America’s homeland, the bill was inevitably suspected of being a back-door way of assembling an army to fight abroad. With bipartisan support, it became law in October.
Churchill kept the lines open to Kennedy, but the ambassador soon found that he no longer enjoyed free access to Downing Street and top ministers. Kennedy was considered no fun—an important element in winning favor in Churchill’s circle—not least because he always declined the cocktails offered by the prime minister, citing his gastrointestinal troubles. Above all, he was not welcome because he was a defeatist.
After a meeting with Churchill and his successor as First Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander,15 Kennedy wrote in his diary, “A very definite shadow of defeat was hanging over them all.”16 At the height of the Battle of France, when Churchill told Kennedy to “not be too depressed,” Kennedy’s riposte was that he “couldn’t help my inner thoughts based on facts.”17 On May 20, he wrote to Rose, “The jig is up. The situation is more than critical. It means a terrible finish for the Allies.” He told her he expected “a dictated peace with Hitler probably getting the British Navy, and we will find ourselves in a terrible mess.”18
Still Kennedy clung to the notion that isolationism would save America from a similar fate. “If God hadn’t surrounded us with oceans three and five thousand miles wide, we ourselves might be caving in at some Munich,” he wrote.19 Little wonder, then, that Churchill put off meeting him, or, to Kennedy’s fury, kept him waiting while he took an afternoon nap. “I expressed my resentment at this because I feel it was personal,” Kennedy wrote in his diary. (He was right.) Kennedy’s complaints to Chamberlain about his rude treatment only served to emphasize how they had both been sidestepped by the forceful, idiosyncratic new prime minister.
Five days after German forces invaded the Low Countries and crossed the French border, Lindbergh met with Merwin K. Hart,20 a Fascist sympathizer who opposed the New Deal, then with a group of New Yorkers, to mount a campaign to keep America out of the war. Even as the Germans continued their Blitzkrieg, Lindbergh was planning a trip to Europe which at the last minute he was obliged to cancel. “I can do nothing [in Europe] under these conditions and feel it is essential for me to keep in close contact with developments in this country,” he told his diary. “There will be greatly increased pressure for us to enter the war.”21 Hart and Carl W. Ackerman, dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, tried to persuade him to barnstorm across America in his plane, giving speeches and meeting with donors to boost the antiwar campaign. Instead, Lindbergh agreed to give another radio broadcast.
As Amiens and Arras in northern France, just 70 miles from Calais, were surrounded by German forces, Lindbergh prepared a broadcast titled “The Air Defense of America.” Secretary of War Woodring asked to see the script before it was delivered, but Lindbergh refused, calling the demand “a clumsy effort to dull the edge of my talk and turn it to the Administration’s advantage.”22 The broadcast went ahead on May 19, without clearance from the War Department.
In a reference to Roosevelt’s warning that the US was in danger of aerial bombing, he conceded “that bombing planes can be built with sufficient range to cross the Atlantic and return” and recommended that America should build air bases on the Mexican and Canadian borders. But he urged listeners to “stop this hysterical chatter of calamity and invasion.” “We are in danger of war today not because European people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of America, but because American people have attempted to interfere with the internal affairs of Europe,” he said. “We need not fear a foreign invasion unless American peoples bring it on through their own quarreling and meddling with affairs abroad.”
Years ago we decided to stay out of foreign wars. . . . We must not waver now that the crisis is at hand. There is no longer time for us to enter this war successfully. . . . Let us turn again to America’s traditional role—that of building and guarding our own destiny. . . . Regardless of which side wins this war, there is no reason, aside from our own actions, to prevent a continuation of peaceful relationships between America and the countries of Europe. If we desire peace, we need only stop asking for war. No one wishes to attack us, and no one is in a position to do so. The only reason that we are in danger of becoming involved in this war is because there are powerful elements in America who desire us to take part.23
The New York Times editorial writers called Lindbergh “a blind young man if he really believes that we can live on terms of equal peace and happiness ‘regardless of which side wins this war,’ ”24 but isolationist leaders were delighted by his plain speaking. Roosevelt was left in a quandary about what to do to hush this eloquent advocate of appeasement.
Still reluctant to order Lindbergh’s silence for fear of unfavorable publicity, the administration began putting pressure on those around him. Morgenthau moved against Lindbergh’s military attaché friend Truman Smith, who had helped write Lindbergh’s broadcasts, and pressed Marshall to fire him from military intelligence. Marshall said he was too valuable to dismiss, but in order to distance him from Lindbergh, he sent Smith to Fort Benning, Georgia. “Kay [Truman Smith’s wife] says the report is around Washington that the Administration is out to ‘get me’,” Truman Smith told his diary. “It is not the first time, and it won’t be the last.”25 Lindbergh stopped meeting friends in the Air Corps “as I know that the politicians of this Administration make as much trouble as possible for anyone I have contact with.”26
Lindbergh’s journalist friend John Lewis told him “that someone had started the rumor that [Lewis] had taken part in writing my radio addresses and that two of his ‘sponsorships’ in New York City had been canceled as a result. Lewis had been forced to state over the radio that he had nothing whatever to do with writing my addresses.”27 Anne Lindbergh also began feeling the strain of supporting her husband, writing to Madame Carrel, the wife of her husband’s French guru, that he “has been gravely misunderstood, misquoted, and as usual smeared with false accusations and motives.” She “felt very badly” about being “arbitrarily labeled and shelved on a side so opposite to all one’s friends and feelings.”28 One ally the Lindberghs were slowly losing was her mother, Elizabeth Morrow, the acting president of Smith College, who was involved in the Bundles for Britain aid program, made regular radio broadcasts promoting the British and French cause, and was a member of William Allen White’s committee to repeal all remaining aspects of the neutrality laws.
The war soon worsened. The Belgian army was on the point of surrender and, as the retreating French army fought a rearguard action, German tanks continued to advance on Paris. With the French generals in disarray and Reynaud’s government hopping from one provincial town to the next ahead of the German advance, Churchill tried to slow their retreat by visiting France six times between his elevation to the premiership and the French surrender. Bullitt reported to Roosevelt that he expected Paris to be under German occupation within ten days. The president urgently cabled Reynaud saying they should not in any circumstances allow the French fleet to fall into German hands.
On Sunday evening, May 26, Roosevelt delivered a fireside chat. “There are many among us who in the past closed their eyes to events abroad because they believed . . . that what was taking place in Europe was none of our business; that no matter what happened over there, the United States could always pursue its peaceful and unique course in the world,” he said. It was no longer possible to take comfort from the fact that “hundreds of miles of salt water made the American Hemisphere”29 immune from attack. His message was that isolationism was finished.
Lindbergh did not agree. Hart and Ackerman suggested that he leave the Air Corps and head a committee of prominent isolationists. He demurred, but met with isolationist leaders of the American Legion, including World War One flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker,30 and agreed to speak at one of their rallies.
Events in Europe were not kind to Lindbergh and his fellow believers. The British expeditionary force of nearly a quarter of a million men, along with 45,000 French troops, surrounded on all sides by advancing German forces and under attack from the Luftwaffe, was driven back to the Channel ports of Calais and Dunkirk. Between May 27 and June 1, something close to a miracle took place. The Royal Navy, joined by a ragbag flotilla of nearly a thousand small craft, from racing yachts to tugboats, from every port in the southeast of England, effected an audacious rescue. In total, 338,000 men—224,000 British and 111,000 French, Poles, and Belgians—were lifted from Dunkirk and the adjacent beaches, leaving just 40,000 mostly French troops to be taken prisoner.
The evacuation, however, was limited to men. Left in northern France were 2,472 guns, 20,000 motorcycles, 65,000 military vehicles, and 75,000 tons of ammunition. Now more than ever, Churchill needed America to restock his depleted arsenal. An Allied triumph snatched from the jaws of defeat, Dunkirk was a setback of sorts for Lindbergh, for it showed that, contrary to his theorizing, battles could not be won by air power alone. Within range of British airfields and with the Royal Navy’s dominance of the seas, the Luftwaffe had suffered disproportionate losses at Dunkirk, with four aircraft downed for every one British plane.
On June 1, Churchill pleaded with Roosevelt for 200 warplanes. “The courage and success of our pilots against numerical superiority are a guaranty that they will be well used,” he said. “At the present rate of comparative losses they would account for something like 800 German machines.”31 Roosevelt promised to restore the British army to its pre-Dunkirk strength. Within six weeks of Churchill’s request, Britain took delivery of 450 field artillery guns and a million shells, 500,000 (albeit outdated) Enfield rifles, 25,000 Browning machine guns, 5,000 trench mortars, and 130 million rounds of ammunition, high explosives, and miscellaneous bombs. The administration circumvented what was left of the neutrality laws by selling the equipment to the Anglo-French Purchasing Commission, specially set up to buy arms and military equipment from America via the private U.S. Steel Corporation.
The ungainly retreat at Dunkirk turned British public opinion. By dint of his inspirational oratory, Churchill was able to portray the emergency evacuation as a heroic escape; despite overwhelming odds, Britain could beat Hitler. “Wars are not won by evacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance,” Churchill told the Commons. With the American radio audience in mind, he declared:
We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender. And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island, or a large part of it, were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.32
Churchill’s address in the wake of Dunkirk proved to be his most memorable. The fighting spirit of Dunkirk put an end to talk of a negotiated peace. Although Americans remained reluctant to acknowledge that the war would eventually involve them, rearmament and the training of forces in America began to pick up speed. Dwight Eisenhower,33 returning home in 1940 from the Philippines, noted, “Comparatively few understood the direct relationship between American prosperity and physical safety . . . [and] the existence of a free world beyond our shores. Consequently, the only Americans who thought about preparation for war were a few professionals in the armed services and those far-seeing statesmen who understood that American isolation from any major conflict was now completely improbable.”34 By the middle of June, the regular army’s strength reached 375,000, almost triple the figure a year earlier.
Mussolini’s declaration of war against the democracies on June 10, and a desperate appeal from Reynaud, via Bullitt, to “declare publicly that the United States will give the Allies aid and material support by all means short of an expeditionary force,”35 prompted Roosevelt once again to broadcast to the nation. He had concluded that the best way to keep America out of the war was to keep Britain in it. But that would require support for the British which the isolationists remained determined to deny. On the day of the broadcast, June 10, Paris was abandoned to its fate by Reynaud.
Roosevelt said that young Americans were rightly asking what the future holds for people who live under democratic forms of government. Some Americans, he said, “still hold to the now somewhat obvious delusion that we of the United States can safely permit the United States to become a lone island, a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force. Such an island may be the dream of those who still talk and vote as isolationists. Such an island represents to me and to the overwhelming majority of Americans today a helpless nightmare of a people without freedom—the nightmare of a people lodged in prison, handcuffed, hungry, and fed through the bars from day to day by the contemptuous, unpitying masters of other continents.”
He asserted, “Our sympathies lie with those nations that are giving their life blood” to counter “the gods of force and hate.” In deploring the entry into the war of Italy on the German side, the president used a phrase the State Department had urged him not to use: “The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor.” In response, he announced, “We will extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation.”36 It was a message greeted with gratitude and relief by the British and French radio audience. The isolationists, however, were alarmed.
Listening to Roosevelt’s broadcast, Lindbergh “felt [the president] would like to declare war, and was held back only by his knowledge that the country would not stand for it.”37 In Washington, Lindbergh met with a number of isolationist congressmen, including senators Clark from Missouri, Van Zandt, La Follette, Wheeler, and Reynolds. “We discussed plans for counteracting war agitation and propaganda,” he told his diary. “Everyone is very much worried about Roosevelt and feels he is leading the country to war as rapidly as he can.”38
The following day, Churchill cabled Roosevelt. “We all listened to you last night and were fortified by the grand scope of your declaration,” he wrote, but he drew the president’s attention to the Italian submarines that would soon make Allied merchant shipping in the Mediterranean and Atlantic more hazardous. “The ocean traffic by which we live may be strangled,” he said.39 He again begged the president for old destroyers. The next day, after visiting the French government and military leaders in Briare, near Orléans, Churchill wrote to the president again, warning that “the aged Marshal Pétain40 . . . is I fear ready to lend his name and prestige to a treaty of peace for France. . . . If there is anything you can say publicly or privately to the French, now is the time.”41
The French cabinet were on the run. Before they set off the following day for Tours, a further 50 miles southwest of Paris, Churchill again pleaded with Roosevelt to intervene. “Anything you can say or do to help [the French] now may make a difference,” he said.42 Kennedy told Roosevelt that “unless the United States declared war on Germany and came in, France was not going to fight.”43 Roosevelt promptly cabled Reynaud that “this Government is doing everything in its power to make available to the Allied Governments the material they so urgently require.”44
On June 14, the day German troops entered Paris, there was a further plea from Churchill to Roosevelt, saying that he had not hesitated “to refuse consent to an armistice or separate peace [asked for by the French government].” He reported Reynaud’s view “that hope could only be kindled by American intervention” and asked that Roosevelt’s “magnificent message” of support for France be published. “It will I am sure decide the French to deny Hitler a patched-up peace with France,” he wrote.45
It was left to Roosevelt to give a lesson in the practicalities of American politics to Churchill (who surely did not need one) and Reynaud (who plainly did). His message of support was not “intended to commit and did not commit this Government to military participation,” he wrote to Churchill. “There is of course no authority under our Constitution except in the Congress to make any commitment of this nature.” He refused to allow his message of encouragement to be made public since it was “imperative that there be avoided any possible misunderstanding”46—by which he meant misunderstanding by Congress and the American people.
“I understand all your difficulties with American public opinion and Congress,” Churchill replied on June 15, “but events are moving downward at a pace where they will pass beyond the control of American public opinion. . . . If we go down you may have a United States of Europe under the Nazi command far more numerous, far stronger, far better armed than the New World.” Roosevelt needed no reminding. Events were running faster than his ability to convert American opinion.
Churchill now asked “as a matter of life or death to be reinforced with [the American] destroyers.”47 On reading Churchill’s cable, Morgenthau told Roosevelt that “unless we do something to give the English additional destroyers, it seems to me it is absolutely hopeless to expect them to keep going.”48 Churchill appealed to Roosevelt, in his second long cable of the day, “When I speak of entering the war I am, of course, not thinking in terms of an expeditionary force, which I know is out of the question. What I have in mind is the tremendous moral effect that such an American decision would produce not merely in France but also in all the democratic countries of the world.”49
The following day, June 16, despite Churchill’s cabinet’s agreement to an audacious and startling plan to merge Britain with France, Reynaud resigned, to be succeeded by Marshal Philippe Pétain,50 a hero of World War One known as the Lion of Verdun, who immediately began surrender negotiations. In a studied act of humiliation, on June 21, French ministers were obliged to sign the terms of surrender in the railway carriage in Compiègne in which the Germans signed the Armistice in 1918.
Hitler and some fellow veterans from World War One went directly from the capitulation to tour his new prize, Paris. As he looked upon the tomb of Napoleon in Les Invalides, he confided to Heinrich Hoffmann, the photographer who recorded his every triumph, that he was enjoying “the greatest and finest moment of my life.”51 The Battle of France was over; the Battle of Britain was about to begin.