FDR - Jean Edward Smith [280]
The United States was currently producing 6,000 airplanes a year. Roosevelt asked for 50,000. He requested funds for modernizing the Army and Navy, as well as to increase production facilities for everything that was needed. Recognizing the power of the America First lobby, he also asked Congress to take no action that would hamper delivery of U.S. planes to the Allies.45 At the end of the month, with the war in France going badly, Roosevelt asked for another $1.9 billion.46 By May 1941, one year later, Congress had appropriated a total of $37.3 billion for defense—a figure roughly four times the entire federal budget in 1939.47
The day after receiving Churchill’s request, Roosevelt responded. Airplanes, antiaircraft weapons, ammunition, and steel, said the president, would be provided. But the destroyers were unavailable. “As you know a step of that kind could not be taken except with the specific authorization of Congress and I am not certain that it would be wise for that suggestion to be made to the Congress at this moment.”48
Churchill was sympathetic. “We are determined to persevere to the very end whatever the result of the great battle in France may be. But if American assistance is to play any part it must be available.”49
As events unfolded in Europe, the nation’s Democratic primaries passed almost unnoticed. Oregon voters went to the polls on May 17 and voted 9 to 1 for Roosevelt over Garner. In Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, Roosevelt slates were unopposed. In Wisconsin, FDR took twenty-one delegates to Garner’s three. In Illinois he swept all fifty-eight. In California, which Garner carried in 1932, Roosevelt won all but one delegate. Even Texas chose a pro-Roosevelt delegation.50 FDR made no public reference to the primaries and did not campaign, but he did not prevent supporters from filing slates on his behalf.*
In France the war proceeded with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. On May 20 German armor reached the Channel coast at Abbeville, slicing France in two. On the twenty-second the panzers wheeled north pinning the French First Army, the 350,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force, and the Belgian Army against the sea. The Belgians surrendered on May 28, and the bulk of the BEF, together with some 100,000 French troops, were evacuated from Dunkirk between May 29 and June 2.51 Left behind was the equipment of the British Army, including all of its artillery, small arms, 7,000 tons of ammunition, and 120,000 vehicles. “Never has a nation been so naked before her foes,” wrote Churchill.52
The British losses at Dunkirk created an even greater need for American assistance, but Churchill’s request for weapons had been pigeonholed by the War Department. Secretary Woodring opposed providing anything, General Hap Arnold stressed the prior needs of the Army Air Corps, and the general staff worried about hemispheric defense. General Marshall cut through the resistance. Recognizing that the president wanted to provide everything possible, Marshall ordered Army supply depots inventoried, redefined American requirements, and declared surplus more or less what the British needed. Working closely with Treasury secretary Morgenthau, Marshall arranged for the equipment to be sold directly to two U.S. corporations, Curtiss-Wright and United States Steel, which resold it to the British at cost. Solicitor General Francis Biddle sprinkled legal holy water over the transaction, and by June 5 some 22,000 .30-caliber machine guns, 25,000 Browning automatic rifles, 900 75 mm howitzers, 58,000 antiaircraft weapons, 500,000 Enfield rifles left over from World War I, and 130 million rounds of ammunition were on their way to Britain. “I am delighted to have that list of surplus material which is ‘ready to roll,’ ” Roosevelt wrote Morgenthau.