Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [57]
By later standards, it was all a pretty small affair. At its peak strength the R. A. F. had 570 fighters on the line; throughout the battle they lost 790. The Germans seem to have lost nearly 1,400 airplanes of one kind or another. Yet the results were hardly small; had Britain succumbed, it is difficult to see how the war against Hitler would ever have been won. Churchill’s tribute to the Royal Air Force, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few” was well deserved, and it was indeed Britain’s finest hour.
10. The United States and the War
BY THE FALL OF 1940, it was apparent that Adolf Hitler could not defeat Great Britain. Operation Sea Lion was postponed, and the German machine turned its attention to the East. It was equally apparent that at least for the foreseeable future Great Britain could not beat Hitler. Britain did not quite stand alone; she had the resources of the Commonwealth and Empire behind her, but these were not significant enough to make any substantial difference. As the Anglo-Axis war shifted to the Mediterranean, a kind of equilibrium had developed. The same sort of balance was being achieved in the Far East, where the Japanese had all but defeated China, but lacked the resources to carry their fight to a definitive conclusion.
Two great powers remained uncommitted, the entry of either of which might overturn this delicate balance; the first was Russia and the second was the United States. There were permutations in this; the United States was highly unlikely to join in on the side of the Axis; her ultimate entry into the war could only be on the side of the Allies. But Russia might go either way. She was already allied with Nazi Germany, and the alliance, if it was a bit uneasy, had worked fairly satisfactorily. Both partners had derived territorial and economic advantages from it. A Hitler-Stalin agreement to divide Europe and the Near East was no more unthinkable than some of the arrangements Europe had already seen. On the other hand Russia and Germany might fall out, and this is of course what did happen. Yet when Hitler did invade Russia, in June of 1941, he very nearly overran her as he had done France and all the other continental states, so that even Russia’s entry into the war did not destroy the equilibrium created in late 1940. There was the further complication of Russo-Japanese relations, which were at a low state in 1940 and 1941, and a Russo-Japanese war was not entirely out of the question.
Russo-German relations were crucial to the subsequent course of the war. The American diplomat George F. Kennan has pointed out that in 1941 the dictators were more powerful than the democracies, and if they had all managed to hang together—Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union, plus all their satellites—they would almost certainly have won the war. As it was, with Russian power remaining an imponderable even after she entered the war, the question came back to the United States. Hitler did not know a great deal about the Americans, and did his best to ignore them. Churchill was immensely conscious of the United States, and consistently wooed her good opinion. Long before Pearl Harbor, American attitudes and policies were a vital factor in the war.
As the war hovered over Europe, the United States had been determinedly neutral. The passage of the Neutrality Acts showed the depth of American distrust of the European scene: that had been in 1937. In 1938 at Lima, the Americans had led the other