Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [93]
In responding to Churchill, Roosevelt never addressed this point, and his evasion was significant. He acknowledged a strong U.S. national interest in Britain’s continued resistance, displaying extraordinary energy and imagination in moving public and congressional opinion, but not in its postwar solvency. American policy throughout the war emphasised the importance of strengthening its competitive trading position vis-à-vis Britain, by ending “imperial preference.” The embattled British began to receive direct aid, through Lend-Lease, only when the last of their gold and foreign assets had been surrendered. Many British businesses in America were sold at firesale prices. The Viscose rayon-manufacturing company, the jewel in the overseas crown of the Courtaulds company and possessing assets worth $120 million, was knocked down for a mere $54 million, because Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau insisted that the cash should be realised at a week’s notice. New York bankers pocketed $4 million of this sum in commission on a riskless transaction. Shell, Lever Brothers, Dunlop Tire and British insurance interests were alike compelled to sell off their U.S. holdings for whatever American rivals chose to pay. The governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman, wrote in March 1941: “I have never realised so strongly as now324 how entirely we are in the hands of American ‘friends’ over direct investments, and how much it looks as if, with kind words and feelings, they were going to extract these one after another.”
The British government exhausted every expedient to meet U.S. invoices. The Belgian government in exile lent £60 million worth of gold which had been brought out of Brussels, although their Dutch and Norwegian counterparts refused to sell gold for sterling. An American cruiser collected from Cape Town Britain’s last £50 million in bullion. Lend-Lease came with ruthless conditions constraining British overseas trade, so stringent that London had to plead with Washington for minimal concessions enabling them to pay for Argentine meat, vital to feeding Britain’s people. Postwar British commercial aviation was hamstrung by the Lend-Lease terms. If Roosevelt’s behaviour was founded upon a pragmatic assessment of political realities and protection of U.S. national interests, only the imperatives of the moment could have obliged Churchill publicly to assert its “unselfishness.” Whatever U.S. policy towards Britain represented between 1939 and 1945, it was never that. “Our desperate straits alone325 could justify its terms,” wrote Eden about the first round of Lend-Lease.
Most of the British anyway did not care for their transatlantic cousins. Anti-Americanism was pronounced among the aristocracy. Halifax, whom Churchill dispatched to Britain’s Washington embassy in December 1940, told Stanley Baldwin: “I have never liked Americans, except odd ones326. In the mass I have always found them dreadful.” Lord Linlithgow, a fellow grandee who was viceroy of India, wrote to commiserate with Halifax on his posting: “The heavy labour of toadying327 to your pack of pole-squatting parvenus! What a country, and what savages those who inhabit it!” Halifax told Eden that he had proposed him as an alternative candidate for the ambassadorship: “I only said that I thought you might hate it328 a little less than myself!”
Installed at the embassy, the former foreign secretary endured much suffering in the service of Britain, not least during a visit to a Chicago White Sox game in May 1941, at which he found himself invited to eat a hot dog. This was too much for the