All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [119]
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