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By Root 1645 0

Brewster F2A Buffalos were rightly known as ‘flying coffins’. The Douglas TBD Devastator bomber was a death-trap, its pilots essentially wiped out at the Battle of Midway trying to drop often unreliable torpedoes. American-designed Lee, Grant, and Stuart tanks – and even the much-heralded Shermans (‘Ronson Lighters’) – were intrinsically inferior to most contemporary German models, which had a far better armor and armament. With the exception of the superb M-1 rifle, it is hard to rank any American weapons system as comparable to those used by the Wehrmacht, at least until 1944–45. We never developed guns quite comparable to the fast-firing, lethal German .88 artillery platform. Our anti-tank weapons of all calibers remained substandard. Most of our machine guns and mortars were reliable – but of World War I vintage.36

Yet the sheer quantity of weaponry being produced by America outstripped anything the Axis could match.

Although it was Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor that brought an Anglo-American military alliance into being for the first time since 1918, with Churchill making good his promise at the Lord Mayor’s luncheon on 10 November to declare war on Japan ‘within the hour’ of a Japanese attack, Hitler’s declaration of war meant that the Western alliance would have teeth. A great deal had already been agreed in secret Staff conversations in Washington about the eventuality of war, and the scene was now set for closer and more direct conversations between Roosevelt and Churchill in that city before the year was out. There was nothing inevitable about the wartime alliance between America and Britain; the Axis brought it into being. There had been much rivalry between Britain and the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, exacerbated by ignorant stereotyping on both sides. According to the wartime journals of the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, a Captain Smith asked the former US military attaché to London, Lieutenant-colonel Howard C. Davidson, how the English really felt about the Americans. ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ Davidson replied. ‘The English feel about us just the way we feel about a prosperous nigger.’37

Yet the Anglo-American alliance after 1941 was to be by far the closest of any of the collaborations between the major powers in the war, at sea where they immediately divided up the world’s oceans into patrolling districts, in the air when the USAAF and RAF took it in turns to bomb Germany by day and night respectively, and on the ground where joint operations were undertaken in North Africa by November 1942, and subsequently in Italy, Normandy and finally Germany itself, all under supreme commanders who controlled the forces of both powers. Smarter diplomacy by Hitler might have prevented the creation of an alliance that was to fling his armies out of Africa, the Mediterranean and France over the coming three years.

In his memoirs published in 1950, Churchill was forthright about his emotions when he heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor. ‘No American will think it wrong of me’, he wrote in The Grand Alliance,

if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all!… Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.38

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Meanwhile, the Roosevelt Administration began to intern virtually the entire Japanese-American community of the United States, a panic measure for which subsequent Administrations have apologized and paid compensation. Nonetheless, this tough act needs to be seen in its proper historical context. Although 69 per cent of the 100,500 Japanese who were interned under Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 were US citizens, that still leaves 31 per cent, or 30,500 people, who were not. With the level of danger posed by Imperial Japan in the spring of 1942, when their forces