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after a lifetime considering such issues to quote on the long-term implications, rued 'we shall no doubt pay dearly in the end for the fluffy flapdoodle'.62 His assessment was both the most alarming but also the most astute. Headlam retained a broadly similar outlook with the formal announcement of the Atlantic Charter. This was an 'eight point pronouncement' that was 'somewhat vague and woolly in character' and was likely intended for an American audience who would be 'tickled'. His conclusion though was that Britain's hoped for allies were 'a strange and unpleasing people: it is a nuisance that we are so dependent on them'.63 As has been seen, the Dominion governments had been given only the vaguest of indications of what was proposed.64 This led the DO to complain, 'so long as [they] are kept in the dark, they are apt to misconstrue the reasons for our actions . and to suspect us of ulterior motives which, apart perhaps from our wish to ensure absolute secrecy about future plans and operations, do not exist'.65

Throughout 1941 the United States edged towards war with the extension of its naval operations east of Iceland and the eventual final repeal of the most significant remaining provisions of the Neutrality Act. By this stage all bar the most myopic of isolationists recognized that the Roosevelt administration would at some stage soon become a wartime government. As Halifax confided to Amery in May 1941, 'the defeatists and non-interventionists are working very hard'. Later that month, after a visit to the Middle West, he was more optimistic that there was considerable support for a policy of supporting Britain, and that the isolationists were not so strong 'as so many people from a distance think'.66 In August 1941 Hugh Dalton had been told that Roosevelt was 'a sick man and more and more with the mentality of an Emperor'. His source also claimed that although Halifax was now getting on better with the President, he had broken down and wept in front of him only a short time after his arrival 'because he couldn't get on with these Americans'.67 In November of that same year Halifax was attacked by egg and tomato throwing demonstrators as he entered the chancery of Archbishop Edward Mooney in Detroit. He compared working with American government departments to being like 'a disorderly day's rabbit shooting'. 'Nothing comes out where you expect and you are much discouraged. And then, suddenly something emerges quite unexpectedly at the far end of the field'.68 John Maynard Keynes, a regular visitor to Washington as he conducted the complicated financial negotiations, also characterized American officials as 'flying confusedly about like bees, in no ascertainable direction, bearing with them both the menace of the sting and the promise of honey'.69 What remained to be confirmed was the exact manner in which this would take place. The President and his aides were reading intercepted Japanese intelligence and knew that in November 1941 the Nazi Foreign Minister Ribbentrop had agreed that in the event of war involving America, Germany and Japan would be in it together. Even so Hitler spared Roosevelt a tricky political manoeuvre by choosing to declare war on the United States following the Pearl Harbor attack.70

During the war Professor Keith Hancock, considered by one of the greatest modern historians of the British Empire and Commonwealth as 'the greatest', wrote a small volume entitled Argument of Empire.71 Having previously produced the still authoritative Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, he wrote as an Australian who had spent a great deal of time working and living in Britain which made him both enamoured of the way of life he had experienced but also aware of its foibles and follies. His credentials were impeccable and he used these to attack the growing American anti-colonialism stance. Published in 1943 on flimsy wartime paper, it began:

It is difficult to conduct an argument across the Atlantic. John Bull wakes up one morning to read newspaper headlines which give him the impression that Americans are