Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [100]
In the spring of 1941 Harriman became an important American advocate of aid to Britain. Nonetheless, in Washington Hopkins and Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, remained the only prominent members of the administration wholeheartedly committed to such a policy. Other leading Americans remained sceptical. In the War Department, U.S. generals cloaked dogged resistance to shipping abroad arms that were needed at home in a mantle of complaints about allegedly amateurish British purchasing policy. One officer, contemptuous of the informality of the Hopkins mission, told Harriman: “We can’t take seriously requests359 that come late in the evening over a bottle of port.”
Among Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army George Marshall’s key subordinates, there were deep divisions about the merits of participation in the war, and of the British as prospective allies. Some senior officers unashamedly reserved their admiration for the Germans. Maj. Gen. Stanley Embick was a former chief of the War Plans Division who had become sceptical about Churchill and his people during service in France in World War I. Now he believed that Britain’s war effort would fare better if the country changed prime ministers. He thought that U.S. aid should stop far short of belligerency. Like his son-in-law, Maj. Albert Wedemeyer of the War Plans Division, Embick addressed every Anglo-American issue with a determination that his country should not be duped into pulling British chestnuts out of the fire. Maj. Gen. Charles “Bull” Wesson hated the British, because he had once been dispatched from Washington to London with a message for the Chiefs of Staff, and was kept waiting to deliver it. Raymond Lee wrote: “He resented this so much360 that it led to a wrangle and almost hatred on his part for the British, which he exploits at every opportunity. So small an act of discourtesy, either real or imagined, which took place many years ago, is having ill effects in the relations between the two countries today.”
By contrast Col.—soon to be lieutenant general361 and a key figure in Marshall’s team—Joseph McNarney, who had visited Britain, believed it was vital to American national security that Churchill’s island should not fall. Marshall himself was less implacably hostile to the British than Embick, but in the summer of 1941, in the words of a biographer, “if rather than when continued to dominate362 his thinking about American involvement.” Nor was such caution confined to senior officers. Time and Life magazines interviewed U.S. Army draftees, and reported their morale to be low. At a camp movie night in Mississippi, men booed when FDR and Marshall appeared on a newsreel.
Averell Harriman was in no doubt that America should fight. But he departed for London on March 15, 1941, fearful that Roosevelt was still unwilling to lead the United States anywhere near as far or fast as was necessary to avert a Nazi triumph: “I was deeply worried the president363 did not have a policy and had not decided how far he could go … The President obviously hoped that he would not have to face an unpleasant decision. He seemed unwilling to lead public opinion or to force the issue but [he] hoped … that our material aid would let the British do the job.” Few doubted that Roosevelt already stood among America’s greatest presidents. But he was sometimes also a notably cautious one.
Harriman noted in a memorandum of March 11: “I must attempt to convince364 the Prime Minister that I, or someone, must convey to our people his war strategy or else he cannot expect to get maximum aid.” Like Hopkins, he was received in Britain on the reddest of carpets.