Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [37]
A Fortune opinion survey showed that, even before France collapsed, most Americans believed that Germany would win the war. Only 30.3 percent saw any hope for the Allies. A correspondent named Herbert Jones wrote a letter to the Philadelphia Inquirer which reflected widespread sentiment: “The great majority of Americans115 are not pacifists or isolationists, but, after the experience of the last war and Versailles, have no desire to pull Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire for her, under the slogan of ‘Save the World for Democracy.’ They rightly feel that little is to be gained by pouring out our money and the lives of our young men for the cause of either the oppressor of the Jews and Czechs or the oppressor of the Irish and of India …” Richard E. Taylor of Apponaugh116, Rhode Island, wrote to a friend in England, urging him to draw the attention of the authorities to the danger that the Germans might tunnel under the Channel.
Yet some Americans did not despair. An “aid to Britain” committee gathered three million signatures on petitions to the White House. The organisation spawned a Historians’ Committee, under Charles Seymour of Yale; a Scientists’ Committee, under Nobel Prize winner Harold Urey; a Theatre Committee, under playwright and Roosevelt speechwriter Robert Sherwood. Americans were invited to set aside their caricatured view of Britain as a nation of stuffed-shirt sleepyheads, and to perceive instead battling champions of freedom. Novelist Somerset Maugham, arriving in New York, predicted a vastly different postwar Britain, and hinted at the beginnings of one more sympathetic to an American social vision: “I have a feeling … that in the England117 of the future evening dress will be less important than it has been in the past.” America was still far, far from belligerence, but forces favouring intervention were stirring.
In 1941, Churchill devoted immense energy to wooing the United States. But in 1940, once his June appeals to Roosevelt had failed, for several weeks he did not write to the president at all, and dismissed suggestions for a British propaganda offensive. “Propaganda is all very well,”118 he said, “but it is events that make the world. If we smash the Huns here, we shall need no propaganda in the United States … Now we must live. Next year we shall be winning. The year after that we shall triumph. But if we can hold the Germans in this coming month of July … our position will be quite different from today.”
Yet how to “hold them”? U.S. general Raymond Lee, military attaché at the London embassy, wrote: “One queer thing119 about the present situation is that it is one which has never been studied at the Staff College. For years [British officers] had studied our [U.S. Civil War] Valley campaign, operations in India, Afghanistan, Egypt and Europe, had done landings on a hostile shore, but it had never occurred to them that some day they might have to defend the non-combatants of a country at war.” An MP recounted Churchill saying at this time: “I don’t know what we’ll fight120 them with—we shall have to slosh them on the head with bottles—empty ones, of course.” This joke was almost certainly apocryphal, but as the prime minister himself observed of the manner in which spurious Churchilliana accrued, he became “a magnet for iron filings.”
On June 8, Britain’s Home Forces boasted an inventory of just 54 2-pounder antitank guns; 420 field guns, with 200 rounds of ammunition apiece; 613 medium and heavy guns, with 150 rounds for each; and 105 medium and heavy tanks and 395 light tanks. There were only 2,300 Bren light machine guns and 70,000 rifles. Visiting beach defences at St. Margaret’s Bay, in Kent, on June 26, Churchill was told by the local brigadier that he had three antitank guns, with six rounds of ammunition apiece. Not one shot must be wasted on practise, said the prime minister. He dismissed a suggestion that London might, like Paris, be declared an open city. The British capital’s dense streets, he said, offered peerless opportunities for local defence. So dire was the shortage of