Inferno - Max Hastings [121]
The British read such declarations with understandable dismay. While their prime minister pinned all his hopes of ultimate victory on U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. election that 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 of 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 percent 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 percent of Americans saw at least an even chance of their country getting into the war; but while 41 percent favoured giving Britain all possible material aid, only 15.9 percent 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