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By Root 848 0

can be visibly represented the better from the American point of view'. As the ambassador told London, the reconstruction of the Imperial War Cabinet would help to strengthen the argument that the Allies were fighting for the freedom of small nations. He could not see any sense of suspicion or antipathy to be found towards the Dominions in America and, as he continued, if his hosts were ever going to come out of isolation and provide greater assistance 'she would be far more likely to do so if the proposal is to cooperate with a British commonwealth of free nations all of whom are obviously taking a hand in formulating policy and wartime decisions than with a Britain which would seem once more to be bossing the show'. At the DO there was little enthusiasm for the suggestion. In a lengthy, and often insightful, minute 'constitutional difficulties' were highlighted which would most likely result from any attempt to 'suggest the power of decision should be entrusted to the United Kingdom War Cabinet'. As such 'anything in the nature of a super-Cabinet ... would be unacceptable and would, indeed meet with strong opposition'.26

The significance of the personal relationship that existed between Churchill and Roosevelt has been closely examined. The British capitulation at Munich was the greatest handicap in many American eyes and Chamberlain was at the head of the group of those who were held to be accountable. Churchill was not in this category, and had the added advantage of being half American; his mother Jennie Jerome was an American heiress.27 This did not mean that the relationship between the two was immediately bedecked with intimacy despite the prime minister's subsequent assertion that 'no lover ever studied every whim of his mistress as I did those of President Roosevelt'.28 For much of the inter-war period he and the American leader were not friends nor were they political compatriots. Indeed they had met only once, an encounter in London in 1918 that Churchill completely forgot and his counterpart 'remembered with distaste'.29 In the years that followed the American was, however, keenly aware of the other's reputation as a staunch opponent of Nazism and this appeared to help overcome his initial reservations as the Anglo-Dominion position grew worse through the dark days of Hitler's crushing of European opposition.

By autumn 1940 Britain's dollar reserves were exhausted and as the United States continued to show few signs of offering any credit disaster appeared to loom. A September deal had given the Admiralty 50 old American destroyers of doubtful military value, in return for which Roosevelt gained the long-term mortgage for a raft of prime British real estate scattered around the Empire, and a guarantee that the Royal Navy would never be surrendered to the Germans.30 This was only a relative success. The defeated French government had placed its gold reserves in storage in Canada but British attempts to use this as collateral for further purchases had floundered on Mackenzie King's discomfort over such an act. Negotiations with the Dutch and Belgian governments-in-exile to use the remainder of the monies and commodities that had been rescued with them as they fled the Continent had also proven unsuccessful as the repayment terms demanded were considered to be too onerous. And it soon got worse. The American Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. had requested a complete list of British holdings in the Western Hemisphere, differentiated according to liquidity. When Roosevelt was shown the list, he remarked, 'Well, they aren't bust, there's lots of money there.' He therefore now advised the British authorities that he had arranged for an American destroyer to sail for South Africa to arrange the transfer of some of the United Kingdom's gold held there. It was recognized that this would be virtually the last of the gold reserves available but it was also understood that there was no choice other than to acquiesce to the president's decision. Whitehall's embarrassment was all too apparent, it even being suggested