Inferno - Max Hastings [122]
The strength of isolationism caused FDR to make a declaration during a 1940 campaign broadcast which became one of the most controversial of his life: “And while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” The president’s wife, Eleanor, was among those dismayed by this remark. In her newspaper column “My Day,” she qualified it importantly: “No one can honestly promise you today peace at home or abroad. All any human being can do is to promise that he will do his utmost to prevent this country being involved in war.” The president’s penchant for opacity, indeed deceit, was well recognised. But the enigma which so troubled Winston Churchill as well as the American people in 1940–41 will never be susceptible to resolution: whether Roosevelt could ever have made the United States a full fighting partner in the war had not the Axis precipitated such an outcome.
On polling day, 5 November 1940, the president secured 55 percent support for his reelection, 27.2 million votes to 22.3 million. The U.S. minister to Ireland, who was Roosevelt’s uncle, described British reaction to the result: “The gentlemanly announcer on the BBC this morning at eight o’clock began ‘Roosevelt is in!’ His voice betrayed relief and some exultation.” But the election outcome emphasised the strength of continuing opposition to the president. Many millions shared the views of George Fisk of Cornell University, who argued that “no war ever accomplished what it was intended to.” In December, Roosevelt emphasised to the British government the need for absolute secrecy about the details of arms purchases—for his own domestic political reasons, not those of security.
The American writer Joe Dees wrote to a British friend from New York in January 1941: “All talk centers around aid to England. Americans are proud of the way England is sticking it out, excited by the successes in Albania and Libya, worried over Ireland’s suicidal obstinacy [in remaining neutral], fearful of entry ourselves, yet wanting to help out as much as possible.” But Dees displayed a shrewd understanding of the range of sentiment in his own country when he wrote later in the year: “Some of my friends hold the opinion that Roosevelt should take stronger measures, full-out convoying with American war vessels etc. They think FDR is behind the national tempo instead of ahead of it. But I think he’s driving us as fast as we’ll allow. ‘We’ means 130 million people, includes a mass of corn and wheat-growing, cattle-raising mid-westerners who are sentimentally anti-Nazi but can’t see how the Germans could come all the way across the ocean and do anything when they get here. I couldn’t call the American public unaware. It is aware all right. But it hasn’t that driving conviction that made men die in Spain and other men join the Free French.”
The arguments advanced by Roosevelt for supporting Britain mirrored those later deployed by the Western Allies to justify assistance to the Soviet Union: material aid saved American blood, just as Russian blood spared many British and American lives. The March 1941 Lend-Lease Act authorised credit deliveries: only 1 percent of munitions used by Churchill’s forces that year was Lend-Lease material, but thereafter the programme provided most of the island’s food and fuel, together with a large part of its armed forces’ tanks, transport aircraft and amphibious operations equipment. The British focused their own industrial production on combat aircraft, warships, army weapons and vehicles. From 1941 onwards, they were almost wholly