Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [60]
During the last winter of peace in America, the government set up most of the machinery to administer the war. A huge number of agencies and offices began to transform the United States into what Roosevelt had asked for, the “arsenal of democracy.” Aid to Britain became more overt, and was denounced by the Germans as “moral aggression.” It was not in Germany’s interest to bring about a war with the United States, however, and the Germans eventually put up with considerable provocation and ultimately, overtly belligerent acts without a declaration of war.
In March of 1941, the United States took another step forward, when Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act. Britain could not indefinitely afford to “cash and carry”; the new act empowered the President to lease or provide goods and services to any nation whose defense he thought vital to the defense of the United States. This was almost but not quite a declaration of war. Through the spring the pace accelerated. Axis ships in American ports were seized at the end of March. A week later, the United States government announced it was taking over Greenland as a caretaker for Denmark, whose territory it officially was. The next day, the government allowed American shipping into the Red Sea, making it easier for American goods to reach the British fighting in Egypt. In May, fifty oil tankers were transferred to Britain, and ships belonging to Vichy France were seized. In May 21, a German U-boat torpedoed the freighter Robin Moor, and a week later the President proclaimed a state of unlimited national emergency. Axis credits were frozen, and consulates were closed in June. In July, American troops replaced the British garrison in Iceland.
There was a great deal of domestic opposition. The Lend-Lease Act especially was bitterly attacked, and isolationists saw it as a blank check by which Roosevelt could take the country into war. The strength of the opposition was clearly revealed in the debate over the renewal of the draft. The Selective Service Act of 1940 had been passed for one year. In August of 1941, it came up for reconsideration; the administration badly wanted it passed. In that month, the Germans were advancing toward Leningrad and into the Ukraine, the Japanese were occupying French Indochina, Roosevelt and Churchill met off Newfoundland to sign the Atlantic Charter—and the Selective Service Act passed the House of Representatives by a margin of one vote.
At Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met and agreed on their war aims. Both had former connections with their respective navies, both arrived by ship, the President aboard the U. S. S. Augusta, a graceful, spick-and-span heavy cruiser, the Prime Minister aboard the battle-scarred Prince of Wales. The two leaders hit it off immediately and, in the course of several meetings, produced a basic agreement that Germany was their primary enemy. They also produced the Atlantic Charter, a statement of war aims that eventually evolved into the charter of the United Nations.
The Charter had its intellectual origins in both the old Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson, and the New Deal of President Roosevelt; rather more of it was American than British, but it was the Americans who had yet to be brought into the war and who had to be made to see that it must be fought. The two leaders announced that their countries sought no aggrandizement and no territory contrary to the wishes of peoples involved, that they respected the rights of states to choose their own form of government, and that they would restore sovereign status to those countries deprived of it. They favored equality of economic opportunity, access to raw materials, friendly cooperation. They incorporated Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, and ended with an explicit statement that only when the “Nazi tyranny” was destroyed could these things be achieved. The phrase about Nazi tyranny was Churchill’s, and he wondered if Roosevelt would accept it; the President decided that Americans were ready for it, and were coming to recognize