Hitler prepares for the conquest of Britain, the
Royal Air Force beats off the Luftwaffe,
Roosevelt speeds up the rearmament of America,
and Kennedy finds a way to escape the Blitz.
WHILE THE DEMOCRATS were meeting in Chicago, the war in Europe gathered pace. At the end of June, Hitler’s number two soldier, General Alfred Jodl,1 who masterminded the invasions of Denmark and Norway, wrote, “The final German victory over England is now only a question of time. Enemy offensive operations on a large scale are no longer possible.”2 Britain was alone, protected from invasion by 26 miles of sea that separates Dover from Calais.
On his return from Paris, Hitler read Jodl’s paper, “The continuation of the war against England,” which recommended war by sea and air against British forces, military airfields, and Atlantic convoys, followed by “terror attacks against the centers of population.” When the onslaught caused the British government to capitulate, troops would land on a broad front across the south of England. To ensure air superiority for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain, Jodl insisted that “the fight against the British Air Force must have top priority,”3 a task that the commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, thought simple. On July 16, Hitler approved Sea Lion.
Göring’s confidence that he could clear the skies of British planes sharply contrasted with the skepticism of Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, who by July 29 had come to the conclusion that an invasion of Britain was impractical. For every 100,000 troops landed along the 200-mile British front, 1,722 barges, 1,161 motorboats, 471 tugs, and 155 transport ships would be needed, he said—a feat of requisition and assembly that would take months, during which German industry would be denuded of its small ships and barges, which would cripple the domestic economy. Nor did Raeder believe that the small German navy, under bombardment from the British fleet, would be able to protect the required armada, even if the sea was calm and the weather clement. He argued that Sea Lion should be postponed a full year, until May 1941.
Hitler dismissed Raeder’s reservations and on July 31 called together his top brass to finalize the plan. Raeder repeated his judgment that the invasion was too ambitious unless the Royal Air Force had been defeated. Hitler insisted, however, that Britain should be invaded on September 15. His order of August 1 declared: “The German Air Force is to overcome the British Air Force with all means at its disposal and as soon as possible.”4 It proved easier to give the order than carry it out, not least because of the inadequate assessment of aerial strengths of the two sides. Once again, Lindbergh’s estimates were shown to be wanting, though this time it was his German friends who had been fooled. By suggesting so openly in London and elsewhere that the British air defenses were woefully unprepared, he had misled Hitler.
The accurate numbers showed Germany to be at a disadvantage. By mid-August, Britain was fielding 1,032 fighters against Göring’s 1,011. Britain counted 1,400 pilots, Germany several hundred fewer. Yet such was the fog of war that the RAF high command wrongly concluded they were vastly outnumbered, by 16,000 pilots to 7,300. By September, Göring operated under the illusion that British Fighter Command was down to 177 aircraft when by that time, despite severe losses, it could still muster 656 fighters to hurl at successive German attacks.
The British enjoyed a geographical advantage. Because the dogfights took place largely over British soil, if hit, a Royal Air Force pilot could bail out and take a train back to his base. German pilots faced death or capture. Losses of aircraft and pilots were also persistently misjudged by the British due to “a certain understandable tendency to wishful thinking, underpinned by many fighter pilots reporting the same victim as one of their near companions, with double or treble-counting being a natural result.”5
Churchill had put the Canadian press magnate Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook,6 in charge of boosting aircraft production. During 1940, Aitken’s goading lifted annual warplane manufacture from 3,602 fighters to 4,283, twice the number the Germans could produce, providing the RAF with an additional 352 planes per month at the height of the Battle of Britain.7 Despite German bombing of aircraft factories, British warplane production for 1940 would total 9,924, compared to the Germans’ 8,070.8
On the day Hitler ordered the invasion of Britain, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt to explain that while “we have a large construction of destroyers and anti-U-boat craft coming forward,” the next few months were perilous for Britain. “We could not keep up the present rate of casualties for long, and if we cannot get a substantial reinforcement, the whole fate of the war may be decided by this minor and easily remediable factor.” He again pleaded for the president to “ensure 50 or 60 of your oldest destroyers are sent to me at once.” The British had their backs to the wall. “Mr. President, with great respect I must tell you that in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now,” Churchill wrote. “I know you will do all in your power.”9
Churchill had many allies in America who were also pushing Roosevelt to make a quick decision. One group, the Century Club, centered on the gentlemen’s club the Century Association in New York City, sent a detailed memorandum on August 1, the day after Churchill’s cable arrived, suggesting the decommissioned American destroyers be provided to Britain in exchange for permanent US military bases in British possessions in the Caribbean and a guarantee that if Britain were occupied by German forces, the Royal Navy would relocate to Canada or an American port and resume the fight from there. The Century proposal chimed with Roosevelt’s own fear that Germany would “establish a naval base in the Atlantic islands, say the Azores,”10 from which Hitler would launch bombing assaults upon the United States.
Lothian commended the deal to Churchill, suggesting that if Britain did not voluntarily provide the bases, America might occupy the islands anyway, as a first line of defense.11 “The United States of course is steadily drifting towards war but the constitutional difficulty of getting Congressional declaration of war unless there is a manifest attack upon American soil or its most vital interests are [sic] such that the United States is likely to find herself fighting under cover in different parts of the world long before formal belligerency is recognized,” Lothian cabled the prime minister.12
Kennedy was keenly aware of Britain’s need for warships, but also that granting the destroyers in exchange for bases escalated America’s participation in the war. “England is suffering great losses on the seas,” he told his son John. “The destroyer problem is a precarious one for them because they are losing them altogether too fast. . . . Germany’s fast motor boats, submarines and dive-bombers are seriously handicapping the progress of imports and exports.” But, anxious not to encourage Roosevelt to drift into undeclared war, the ambassador did not take it upon himself to press the president or Hull to find the hardware Britain needed.
On August 2, Roosevelt gained US cabinet support to exchange the old destroyers for bases and the same day asked William Allen White to suggest to Willkie that he persuade Republicans in Congress to allow the measure to become bipartisan. The planned deal was given a boost when a number of prominent New York lawyers, including Dean Acheson,13 wrote to the New York Times saying that the destroyers-for-bases deal was an essential part of national defense and that the president did not need congressional approval because he could use an executive order, an opinion confirmed by attorney general Robert H. Jackson. By describing the deal as a piece of artful negotiation in which America came out best, Marshall and Stark could, with some justification, argue that the mothballed destroyers were surplus to requirements under the congressional ban on providing any war materiel that might be of use to America’s defense. They approved the deal.
On August 13, Roosevelt asked Kennedy to deliver in person to Churchill a cable confirming he would supply fifty destroyers, some motor torpedo boats, and a number of warplanes, though they “would only be furnished if the American people and the Congress frankly recognized that in return therefor the national defense and security of the United States would be enhanced.” The conditions were along Century Club lines: that the British fleet would evacuate to “other parts of the Empire for continued defense of the Empire”14 and that America be granted ninety-nine-year leases on bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, and British Guiana.
When the president came to announce the deal, he described it as “the most important event in the defense of the U.S. since Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase.”15 The American people followed Roosevelt’s lead and backed the agreement, with polls showing 60 percent in favor.16 However, to expedite the handover, Roosevelt resorted to executive order rather than putting the deal before Congress as the Constitution intimated. As he explained to King George, “There is virtually no criticism in this country except from legalists who think it should have been submitted to Congress first. If I had done that, the subject would still be in the tender care of the Committees of Congress.”17
Churchill responded with grateful thanks. “I need not tell you how cheered I am,” he wrote. “You will, I am sure, send us everything you can, for you know well that the worth of every destroyer that you can spare to us is measured in rubies.” While he had Roosevelt’s attention, he asked for “as many flying boats and rifles as you can let us have. We have a million men waiting for rifles.” About relocating the fleet, the prime minister insisted that he and the British people had no intention of surrendering. Indeed, “Their confidence in the issue has been enormously and legitimately strengthened by the severe air fighting of the past week.”18
Churchill told Kennedy, who was once more kept waiting while the prime minister finished an afternoon nap, “We are going to beat this man.”19 Kennedy was furious that he had first learned of the destroyers deal when Churchill read the cable to him. He told his diary, “Nothing has been said to me about it and Roosevelt’s conduct in this closing phase of the negotiations was just as inconsiderate as during the entire negotiations.”20
In a cable marked “For the president, personal and confidential,” the ambassador expressed his anger at being cut out of arrangements that more than any other act drew America deeper into war. “It has been impossible for me to make any contribution to the destroyer-for-bases discussion seeing as I do not know any of the facts, except second hand,” he said. “Frankly and honestly I do not enjoy being a dummy. I am very unhappy about the whole position and of course there is always the alternative of resigning.”21 Roosevelt, anxious that Kennedy stay at his post until after the election, replied, “There is no thought of embarrassing you. Don’t forget that you are not only not a dummy but are essential to us both in the Government and in the Nation.”22
In the week before the destroyers-for-bases deal was struck, the skies over England were filled with dueling British and German pilots. Luftwaffe bombers raided ports, airfields, and radar bases, but the worst was to come. What Göring called Operation Eagle, and history has come to think of as the Battle of Britain, started in earnest on August 15. Before battle was joined, the stout Reich Marshal was so confident that he enjoyed superiority both in numbers and quality of men and machines that he predicted it would take only four days before Churchill came suing for peace. He boasted that Jodl need not worry about naval support for the maritime invasion of the British Isles because the British would be so demoralized by the pounding that a forced occupation would be unnecessary.
Throughout July, the Luftwaffe had increased their pummeling, targeting British commercial vessels going through the Straits of Dover, bombing southern English ports, and mounting sorties from newly occupied airbases in Normandy to deliver mostly inconsequential damage upon targets in the west of England.
On August 12, the preliminaries to the battle began in earnest when German warplanes attacked British radar bases strung along the southern and eastern coastline. But the failure to extinguish these sources of highly accurate information about German air movements culled by a novel scientific method proved to be the first of Göring’s many strategic mistakes. “It is doubtful whether there is any point in continuing the attacks on radar stations,” he declared on August 15, “since not one of those attacked has so far been put out of action.”23
Over the next two days, 1,500 German aircraft were sent to destroy British airfields, but they failed to make a permanent dent. Forty-seven German planes were lost, to the British thirteen. On August 14, in fighter skirmishes above Kent, Surrey, and East Sussex, the Luftwaffe lost seventy-one planes against the RAF’s twenty-seven, many of the German losses being Stuka dive-bombers that turned out to be too slow against the nimble British Spitfires and Hurricanes. And the British enjoyed a further, paradoxical advantage in equipment. The ultra-fast but short-range Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters performed at their best at very high altitudes, but as this was too high for the Spitfires and Hurricanes, the 109s’ unique quality was of little benefit. By August 22, Churchill was able to tell Roosevelt that “the air attack has slackened in the last few days,” though he stressed that “I do not think that bad man has yet struck his full blow.”24 He was correct.
A spate of bad weather between August 19 and 23—a typical English summer—gave the British time to mend their fighters, patch their airfields, rest their pilots, and gather their strength. By August 20, it was clear that Germany had lost the initiative. Churchill told the Commons a stirring tale of what had so far been achieved. He paid tribute to “the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”25
Göring’s second strategic error started with an accident. When, on the night of August 23, a dozen German bombers were sent to destroy aircraft plants and oil storage facilities south of London, they became lost in fog and inadvertently dropped their lethal loads on Central and East London homes. Believing the attack to be an intentional attempt to terrorize civilians, Churchill ordered the bombing of Berlin the following evening in reprisal.
Although it was a similarly overcast night and half of the eighty-one British bombers missed their targets, it was the first time in the German capital’s history that it had come under aerial bombardment, startling the population and stirring Hitler into an indignant rage. In a speech on September 4, Hitler condemned “Churchill’s new brain child,” night bombing, and threatened retaliation of his own. “When they declare that they will increase their attacks on our cities, then we will raze their cities to the ground,” he promised an audience of women nurses and social workers screaming for retribution.26
Hitler’s demand that Göring switch from attacking British fighter bases to carpet-bombing Londoners’ homes saved the RAF on the point of its extinction. Hitler was under the illusion that the British people would crumple and was much encouraged by Washington embassy reports that it was the view of “the American General Staff” that Britain couldn’t hold out much longer.27
In the two weeks between August 24 and September 6, Göring launched 1,000 planes a day to destroy RAF fighter bases, and the battle slowly began to turn in Germany’s favor. In that brief time, five British fighter bases were put out of action and six of the seven headquarters which translated radar intelligence into pilot orders were severely damaged. The RAF lost 466 fighters, with the Germans losing 214 fighters and 138 bombers. A quarter of Britain’s fighter pilots were either killed or wounded.
On Saturday, September 7, Hitler opened the chapter of the war Londoners would dub the Blitz. A giant air armada of 625 bombers accompanied by 648 protective fighters headed up the Thames to the London Docklands in what historian William L. Shirer described as “the most devastating attack from the air ever delivered up to that day on a city.”28 The blips on radar screens of the first wave of the impending attackers triggered invasion warnings across southern England. Church bells pealed, mines were hurriedly laid, and road and rail bridges dynamited. This first crushing two-night assault on the heart of London killed 842 and maimed 2,347. It resumed at a similarly destructive rate every night for a week.
The British, meanwhile, delivered destruction of their own. German naval headquarters staff reported on September 12 that it was becoming increasingly difficult to assemble landing craft in the Channel ports of Ostend, Dunkirk, Calais, and Boulogne for the invasion of Britain “because of the danger of English bombings and shelling [from British bomber planes and warships]. Units of the British Fleet are now able to operate almost unmolested in the Channel.”29
Then came Göring’s third strategic mistake. Spurred by the success of his nighttime raids, on September 15 the Reich Marshal ordered 200 German bombers defended by 600 fighters to deliver a massive daytime bomb load on London in two giant waves. The mission proved disastrous. RAF fighters guided by radar repulsed the assault, finding the lumbering bombers easy targets in broad daylight. The Luftwaffe lost thirty-four bombers and twenty-six fighters, with twenty more damaged but able to limp back to their continental bases; the RAF lost just twenty-six aircraft. The September 15 defeat, though not in itself decisive, confirmed that the RAF could maintain its superiority in British airspace.
Another blow to Germany’s plans for the invasion took place the following day, when RAF bombers destroyed a sizable portion of the invasion armada, sinking twenty-one transport ships and 214 landing craft. The following day, Hitler announced to his high command the indefinite postponement of the invasion of Britain. Halfway through October, Hitler was obliged to concede that “preparations for ‘Sea Lion’ shall be continued solely for the purpose of maintaining political and military pressure on England.”30 The Blitz, however, continued, with bomber fleets making raids for fifty-seven consecutive nights. Churchill reported to Roosevelt that between September 7 and November 3, 1940, 200 German warplanes bombed London every night.31 Far from lowering British morale, however, the deaths and devastation provided a rallying point for the phlegmatic Brits.
Churchill’s dogged resistance, his rousing words, and his compassion also became known to the British people, who might have otherwise dismissed him as a traditional, uncaring Tory. A bond of loyalty was forged between prime minister and people that lasted for the duration of the war.32 Each morning, the prime minister could be found in his element, tramping the rubble-strewn streets in a bowler hat, walking stick in hand, a gas mask in a khaki canvas bag slung over his shoulder, to see the damage wrought overnight and to show that he was happy to share the danger. When, after inspecting a particularly horrible scene of carnage, he burst into tears, as he was liable to do whenever moved by events, a local woman cried out, “Look, he really cares.”33
Rather than retreating to an air-raid shelter, every night Churchill could be found on a rooftop scanning the sky with a pair of binoculars, like a schoolboy in pursuit of a rare bird. Although the number of deaths during the Blitz reached between three and five thousand a month, he told the Commons, “It would take ten years at the present rate for half of the houses of London to be demolished.”34
Churchill’s leadership during the Battle of Britain was not lost on the American press writing and broadcasting from London. “Churchill is causing his associates much anxiety these nights,” reported James “Scotty” Reston.35 “They can’t get him to stay in the shelter at 10 Downing Street.” The pluckiness of the bombarded Cockneys and the often absurd lengths to which they would go to maintain a sense of normality also played well across the Atlantic. When bombs first began falling on London at the end of July, the New York Times published a lyrical paean to the long-suffering Londoners, asking, “Is the tongue of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of Milton, of the King James translation of the Scriptures, of Keats and Shelley to be hereafter, in the British Isles, the dialect of an enslaved race?”36
The coalition between Churchill’s Conservatives, Clement Attlee’s37 Labour Party, and Archie Sinclair’s Liberals was also a subject of admiration for the American reporters. “The democratization of Great Britain goes on apace,” wrote Reston. “What centuries of history have not done for this country, Chancellor Hitler is doing now. He is breaking down the class structure every time his bombers come over. . . . Why, it has got so now that total strangers speak to each other on the streets.”38
“For Americans the Blitz was supremely a radio war,” wrote historian David Reynolds. Networks sent top correspondents to London to report the nightly raids, among them CBS’s Edward R. Murrow,39 and William L. Shirer. The American poet Archibald MacLeish40 paid tribute to the skills of “the Murrow Boys,” writing, “You burned the city of London in our homes, and we felt the flames that burned it. / You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew the dead were our dead.”41
The British government wooed American opinion with London Can Take It, a short movie directed for the Ministry of Information by Humphrey Jennings42 and Harry Watt43 with commentary by an American, Quentin Reynolds,44 who introduced himself as “a neutral reporter.” The film showed how Londoners, in “the greatest civilian army ever assembled,” which included King George and Queen Elizabeth, recovered from a night of bombing. “These are not Hollywood sound effects,” Reynolds intoned, “this is the music they play every night in London. The symphony of war.” He observed that “the sign of a great fighter in the ring is, Can he get up from the floor after being knocked down? London does this every morning.” Reynolds reported that Londoners “would rather stand up and face death than kneel down and face the kind of existence the conqueror would impose upon them.”45 Released by Warner Brothers in America in November 1940, the film was seen by 60 million Americans.
Churchill’s victory in the Battle of Britain, described by his biographer Roy Jenkins as “at least as decisive in its consequences as Blenheim or Waterloo,”46 put paid to the suggestion that there was little point in arming Britain because the military equipment sent would soon fall into the hands of Hitler. It ended, too, suggestions that Churchill was not up to the job because of his drinking and erratic judgment. However difficult it was for those working with him in Downing Street, or for cabinet colleagues who had to put up with a blizzard of memoranda from him on everything from sinking the French fleet to food rationing,47 he had displayed qualities of character and resilience that in Roosevelt’s mind more than made up for the years of shilly-shallying by Chamberlain and the appeasers.
Roosevelt cited the devastating events in Europe when demanding faster American rearmament. He had already received from Congress, in response to his State of the Union address in January, $1.84 billion, a sum he said at the time was “sufficient.” At the end of May, as the British were evacuating Dunkirk, he won a further $1.3 billion. The fall of France gave him the opportunity to ask for $4.8 billion more. Reiterating the promise, “We will not use our arms in a war of aggression; we will not send our men to take part in European wars,” he insisted, “We cannot defend ourselves a little here and a little there. We must be able to defend ourselves wholly and at any time.”48 He recruited two million men in uniform for “selective training” and built 19,000 more warplanes. On October 8, he returned to Congress asking for an astonishing $9 billion in extra spending on defense; it was granted with barely a squeak.
The result of the Battle of Britain further diminished Kennedy’s reputation. Although the ambassador worked to help American nationals leave Britain and facilitated the evacuation of 100,000 British children across the Atlantic, his own behavior was less admirable. While Roosevelt was taking in the queen of Norway, setting her up with a suite of rooms in the White House, Kennedy canceled at short notice Rose’s attempt to adopt Stella Jean Gordon, an English schoolgirl friend of his daughter Jean. “I am not very much impressed with the idea of taking evacuees,” he told Rose. “It is all right while the excitement lasts but having another child in your house eventually gets to be an awful bore. Incidentally, you have to assume responsibility for the child up to its 21st birthday and you have to pay all its bills because they cannot send any money out of here.” Although the Gordon girl had twice been offered a refuge by the Kennedys, the ambassador told his wife, “Lets us [sic] definitely out” as “I think [it] will bring a lot of grief.”49
There was worse. Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright wife of Henry Luce, the owner of Time magazine, sent Kennedy a black comic telegram, “Confucius say man who gets to be American Ambassador should make up mind first whether he looks best in pine or mahogany.”50 For all the reassurance Kennedy gave to Rose that being killed by a bomb was a million-to-one shot and “I am completely a fatalist about bombing accidents,”51 he was in fear of his life. On hearing air-raid sirens, his instinct was to be driven out of London to his mansion in Windsor, far from strategic targets.
This act of self-preservation compared unfavorably to the courage of his friends the king and queen. They insisted that as soon as the German bombers were spotted heading for London they be driven from Windsor Castle, not far from Kennedy’s country hideout, to Buckingham Palace, to suffer the Blitz like the rest of the nation. One day, Churchill visited the palace to find the king shooting at a target with a rifle. He told his prime minister that “if the Germans were coming, he was at least going to get his German.”52 Churchill said that if he felt that way, he would get him a tommy gun.
On September 13, the palace received a direct hit, destroying the chapel and the conservatory, where the king liked to sit to read official papers. The bombing was warmly welcomed by the royal couple as evidence that they, too, were in the firing line. The newsreels showed pictures of the couple standing amid the rubble and reported, “Truly this is a war of all the people. We are all in it.”53 On September 24, the folly of Kennedy’s flights to the country was reinforced when an incendiary bomb that exploded 250 yards from his Windsor home turned out to bear his initials, “J.P.K.”54
Speculating on what Hitler felt about the prospect of Roosevelt winning a third term, Kennedy told his son Bobby that the Führer was hoping to finish off Britain quickly, because “[Hitler] is never sure that, once the political campaign in the United States is over in the Fall, he won’t have the United States giving aid to England in ways that even we do not see now.”55 Kennedy told his son John that the risk was that “if the war lasts any length of time, that Roosevelt might get the United States into the war, even through the back door.”56 He confirmed his fear to J. M. Patterson, publisher and editor of the New York Daily News, writing, “We [at home] are going to be faced more and more with the argument that England is our line of defense and that will serve as a reason for every action we want to take, even up to the declaration of war.”57
Kennedy’s defeatism extended to America’s ability to defend itself. Complaining that his insistence that America stay out of the war had caused “the rather bitter reception” he received when last visiting Washington, he told Rose, “You know I always felt [the Americans] shouldn’t [get into the war] because I knew they couldn’t lick anybody, but you can’t go around telling about your country’s weaknesses.”
Roosevelt’s failure to consult him continued to stoke his anger. “I am thoroughly disgusted with the way Roosevelt is handling the situation,” he told Rose, and explained that he felt ignored by the president, who “sends people over here to get reports,” and that “under ordinary conditions” he would resign.58 In the meantime, wracked with stomach pains that caused him to resort to a diet of puréed vegetables, he hired a French chef who “could purée a bale of hay and make it taste like chocolate ice cream.”59
Kennedy hankered to get home quickly if Churchill won the Battle of Britain. He wanted to be back to take some part in the presidential election, telling Bobby, “That will depend on how gracefully I can make an exit.”60 There was press speculation, perhaps fueled by Kennedy himself, that he would be summoned home to run Roosevelt’s campaign. In a telephone call to his ambassador, “so that you will get the dope straight from me and not somebody else,” Roosevelt told him that “the State Department is very much against your leaving England.” The president insisted it was Hull’s decision, not his, saying, “You know how happy I would be to have you in charge, but the general impression is that it would do the cause of England a great deal of harm.” Kennedy did not miss the chance to tell the president he felt surplus to requirements. “I am not doing a damn thing here that amounts to anything and my services, if they are needed, could be used to much better advantage if I were home.”61
The slights kept coming. When a new US naval attaché was appointed, the cabinet and the War Office—even American reporters in London—knew about the appointment before the ambassador did. Kennedy complained to Hull, “Now there is probably a good reason why it is necessary to go around the Ambassador in London and take up the matter with the British before he knows about it. However, I do not like it and I either want to run this job or get out.”62
The ambassador was dealt a further blow when in late July the ailing Chamberlain was operated on for stomach cancer and three months later stepped down from the cabinet. “My poor old friend Chamberlain is finished,” he wrote to Rose. “He has cancer of the bowel. They haven’t told Mrs. Chamberlain yet.”
The destroyers-for-bases deal had revealed how important it was for Roosevelt and Churchill to remain in step. The prime minister had alarmed the president in a speech to the Commons on August 20 gratefully acknowledging how much the president was helping to arm Britain. “We have ferried across the Atlantic, in the month of July, thanks to our friends over there, an immense mass of munitions of all kinds, cannon, rifles, machine-guns, cartridges, and shell, all safely landed without the loss of a gun or a round,” he said. He even suggested that the deal was the beginning of a wider integration of efforts. For Americans, Churchill’s speech of gratitude was a chilling reminder of how deeply Roosevelt had implicated them in the defense of Britain.
Even more alarming, Churchill suggested that providing military aid was the start of a more intimate constitutional embrace between the two countries. “The British Empire and the United States will have to be somewhat mixed up together in some of their affairs for mutual and general advantage,” he said. “I do not view the process with any misgivings. I could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along.”63 Nor did it help the president when a former British secretary for war, Leslie Hore-Belisha, suggested it was possible that the war would hasten America and Britain becoming a single country with “an eventual common citizenship.”64
Even if that were a pipe dream for the half-American Churchill, he showed how well he could flatter his silent partner in the war against Hitler when he appealed to Roosevelt’s sense that fate had chosen him to complete the work of Woodrow Wilson, declaring, “The right to guide the course of world history is the noblest prize of victory.”