Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [58]
In January of 1939, President Roosevelt went to Congress to get money for defense measures. The American military leaders were especially worried about the security of the Panama Canal, and the government made extensive plans to fortify the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, and the Pacific approaches to the Canal as well. Congress voted $552,000,000 for defense measures. As the year wore on, the President became more and more overtly sympathetic to the democracies. In April, he wrote a joint letter to Hitler and Mussolini asking them to refrain from aggression against specific states and suggesting reduction of armaments. He was either cold-shouldered or treated to contemptuous harangues.
Unfortunately, the Neutrality Acts were couched in such a way that they did not distinguish between aggressors and victims; all belligerents were put in the same class, and this simplistic lumping together of all foreign states tied the administration’s hands when it came to encouraging the democracies. Nonetheless, the United States government permitted the French and British, particularly the former, to place large orders for aircraft with American manufacturers. To a very real extent the initial expansion that has enabled the American aerospace industry to dominate the world ever since 1941 was financed by French government contracts. Ironically, only a small portion of the orders was completed by the time of the fall of France. Some Curtiss fighters reached France, where they worked very well, and a few bombers got there; most of the orders were subsequently taken over by British purchasing commissions. The American government itself began placing orders for new aircraft. Yet in mid-summer, in spite of presidential pressure, Congress refused to modify the Neutrality Acts, and this weakened whatever effect Roosevelt’s pleas and strictures to the European powers might have had as they went to war. On September 5, 1939, the United States declared its neutrality in Europe’s new war.
From the outbreak of World War II, there began in the United States an increasingly heated debate on what role the country ought to play. Generally speaking, Americans were at least mildly sympathetic to France and Great Britain, but definitely not enough to get involved in the actual fighting. There were really three extremes: those few people who thought the United States ought to go to war on the side of the democracies; those even fewer people who thought the U. S. ought to support Germany—there was a minuscule American Nazi Party—and a much larger group who thought the United States ought to avoid any war under any circumstances. In newspapers and magazines there was a tremendous debate over the catchwords of the time: neutrality, isolation, intervention, America first, and all shades and colorations in between. There were quite violent divisions of opinion. William Randolph Hearst and the Hearst newspapers were isolationist and influential; Charles Lindbergh, one of the great heroes of the thirties, had been very impressed by the Luftwaffe and his treatment in Germany and was at least mildly pro-German. Most people were passively pro-British and pro-French and they tended to assume, with an ill-placed complacency, that Britain and France would win—without any help from them.
The fall of Poland came as a shock. Few people in the United States were very concerned about Poland, but the speed and ruthlessness of the Blitzkrieg proved alarming. Roosevelt responded by calling Congress into special session and asking it to amend the Neutrality Acts so that arms and ammunition could be sold to Britain and France—officially to all “belligerents,” but as Britain and France controlled the seas, unofficially only to them. The session became a bitter six-week-long debate on neutrality, but in the end the Neutrality Acts