Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings

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СКАЧАТЬ by a surfeit of leisure and safety, for once a man enters the Army, he is expected only to follow the heels ahead of him.’ Journalist Eric Sevareid described how Roosevelt was ‘slowly gathering together a reluctant, bewildered and resentful army. No civil leaders dared call them “soldiers” – as though there were something shameful in the word…Few made so bold as to suggest that their job was to learn to kill.’

      The hesitant military build-up included purchase of an additional 20,000 horses. ‘The US Army started far too late to prepare seriously for World War II,’ wrote Martin Blumenson. ‘As a result, the training program, the procurement of weapons, and virtually all else were hasty, largely improvised, almost chaotic, and painfully inadequate throughout the intensely short period of mobilization and organization before and after Pearl Harbor.’ Lt. Col. Dwight Eisenhower, commanding an infantry battalion at Fort Lewis, Washington, told his men: ‘We’re going to war. This country is going to war, and I want people who are prepared to fight that war.’ But such rhetoric merely earned him the derisive nickname ‘Alarmist Ike’.

      Many intellectuals disdained Europe’s war because they perceived it as a struggle between rival imperialisms, a view reflected in Quincy Howe’s 1937 tract England Expects Every American to do His Duty. They found it easier to contemplate an explicitly American crusade against fascism than one that allied them with the old European nations, recoiling from association with the preservation of the British, and for that matter French and Dutch, empires. They disliked the notion that the honour and virtue of the United States should be contaminated by association. They questioned whether a war fought in harness with old Tories could be dignified as a moral undertaking. The left-wing Partisan Review asserted: ‘Our entry into the war, under the slogan of “Stop Hitler!” would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here.’

      The treasurer of Harvard, William Claflin, told the university’s president: ‘Hitler’s going to win. Let’s be friends with him.’ Robert Sherwood noted the number of businessmen such as Gen. Robert Wood, Jay Hormel and James Mooney likewise convinced of Hitler’s impending triumph, and thus ‘that the United States had better plan to “do business” with him’. At a meeting at the US Embassy in London on 22 July, senior diplomats agreed there was an even chance that Britain might still be unconquered by 30 September, but this tepid vote of confidence implicitly acknowledged a similarly plausible prospect that Churchill’s island might by that date be occupied. In the September 1940 Atlantic Monthly, Kingman Brewster and Spencer Klaw, editors respectively of the Yale and Harvard student papers, published a manifesto asserting students’ determination not to save Europe from Hitler.

      The British read such declarations with understandable dismay. While their prime minister pinned all his hopes of ultimate victory on US belligerence, in the summer of 1940 his exasperation at the paucity of American aid was matched by scepticism about whether some Washington decision-makers could even be entrusted with British confidences. Churchill wrote on 17 July, opposing disclosure of sensitive defence information: ‘I am not in a hurry to give our secrets until the United States is much nearer to the war than she is now. I expect that anything given to the United States Services, in which there are necessarily so many Germans, goes pretty quickly to Berlin.’ He modified this view only when it became plain that frankness was indispensable to secure American supplies.

      Roosevelt gained domestic support for both aid to Britain and US rearmament by adopting the argument advanced by Gen. John Pershing, his nation’s most famous soldier of World War I: his policies would not hasten engagement in the conflict, but instead push it away from America’s shores. The British were obliged to pay cash on the nail for every weapon shipped to them until their cash and gold reserves were exhausted, and Lend-Lease became effective, late in 1941. It was as a defensive measure that Roosevelt reconciled the American people to the September 1940 destroyers-for-bases deal with Britain, which even the isolationist Chicago Tribune welcomed: ‘Any arrangement which gives the US naval and air bases in regions which must be brought within the American defense zone is to be accepted as a triumph.’ Churchill heeded urgent and frequent warnings from Washington, that he should say nothing publicly before the 1940 US election which suggested an expectation that America would fight in Europe.

      The Luftwaffe’s defeat in the Battle of Britain significantly shifted American sentiment not in favour of joining the fight, but towards a belief that Churchill’s people might hold out. That September, secretary for war Henry Stimson wrote in his diary: ‘It is very interesting to see how the tide of opinion has swung in favour of the eventual victory of G[reat] B[ritain]. The air of pessimism which prevailed two months ago has gone. The reports of our observers on the other side have changed and are now quite optimistic.’ Meanwhile, the Tripartite Pact signed by Germany, Italy and Japan strengthened American public perceptions of a common evil threatening the world: the United States and Britain now found themselves two among only a dozen surviving democracies. An October opinion poll showed 59 per cent American support for material aid to Churchill’s people, even at the risk of war.

      But isolationism remained a critical force in the 1940 presidential race. Though Republican candidate Wendell Willkie was at heart an interventionist, during the campaign his rhetoric was stridently hostile to belligerence. Roosevelt became alarmed that, as a supposed advocate of war, he was threatened with defeat. Gen. Hugh Johnson, a Scripps-Howard syndicated columnist, wrote: ‘I know of no well-informed Washington observer who isn’t convinced that if Mr. R is elected he will drag us into war at the first opportunity, and that if none presents itself he will make one.’ A Fortune poll on 4 November 1940 showed that 70 per cent of Americans saw at least an even chance of America getting into the war; but while 41 per cent favoured giving Britain all possible material aid, only 15.9 per cent advocated sending Americans to fight. Lyndon Johnson, a Democratic Congressman close to the administration on almost all domestic issues, secured big pork-barrel funding for Texas from the surge in defence spending. Johnson nonetheless spoke out against US involvement in Europe, telling his constituents in June 1940: ‘The ability of the American people to think calmly and act wisely during a crisis is going to keep us out of a war.’ He changed his mind only in the summer of 1941, when British defeats in the Mediterranean persuaded him that the threat of an Axis triumph was unacceptable to the United States.

      The strength of isolationism caused FDR to make a declaration during a 1940 campaign broadcast which became one of the most controversial of his life: ‘And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’ The president’s wife Eleanor was among those dismayed by this remark. In her newspaper column ‘My Day’, she qualified it importantly: ‘No one can honestly promise you today peace at home or abroad. All any human being can do is to promise that he will do his utmost to prevent this country being involved in war.’ The president’s penchant for opacity, indeed deceit, was well recognised. But the enigma which so troubled Winston Churchill as well as the American people in 1940–41 will never be susceptible to resolution: whether Roosevelt could ever have made the United States a full fighting partner in the war, had not the Axis precipitated such an outcome.

      On polling day, 5 November 1940, the president secured 55 per cent support for his re-election, 27.2 million votes to 22.3 million. The US minister to Ireland, who was Roosevelt’s uncle, described British reaction to the result: ‘The gentlemanly announcer on the BBC this morning at eight o’clock began “Roosevelt is in!” His voice betrayed relief and some exultation’. But the election outcome emphasised the strength of continuing opposition to the president. Many millions shared the views of George Fisk of Cornell University, who argued that ‘no war ever accomplished what it was intended to’. In December, Roosevelt emphasised to the British government the need for absolute secrecy about the details of arms purchases – for his own domestic political reasons, not those of security.

      American writer Joe Dees wrote to a British friend from New York in January 1941: ‘All talk centers around aid to England. Americans are proud of the way England is sticking it out, excited by the successes СКАЧАТЬ