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fastidious ambassador, who declined. During a trip to Detroit329, he was pelted with eggs and tomatoes by a group calling itself “The Mothers of America.” Oliver Harvey, Eden’s private secretary, described the aloof Halifax’s performance in his role as “pretty hopeless—the old trouble of being unable330 to make real personal contacts … All business in the U.S.A. is now transacted by telephoning and ‘popping-in,’ both of which H can’t abide. He only goes to see the President on business—and naturally usually to ask for things—he has never got onto a more intimate chat basis with him.” Dalton related a mischievous story that Halifax broke down and wept soon after his arrival in Washington, “because he couldn’t get on with these Americans.”331

Many Tory MPs, Eden among them, shared the grandees’ distaste for the United States. Cuthbert Headlam, admittedly something of an old woman, wrote of Americans with condescension: “They really are a strange and unpleasing people332: it is a nuisance that we are so dependent on them.” A Home Intelligence report found “no great enthusiasm for the US333 or for US institutions among any class of the British people … There was an underlying irritation largely due to American ‘apathy.’” Fantastically, some British officers questioned whether it would be in Britain’s interests for America to become a belligerent. Air Marshal Sir John Slessor, with the British mission in Washington in April 1941, noted that some of his colleagues believed that “it wouldn’t really pay us for the US334 to be actively engaged in the war.” Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, later C-in-C of Bomber Command, wrote with characteristic intemperance about the difficulties of representing the RAF in Washington in 1941. It was hard to make progress, he said bitterly,

when one is dealing with a people so arrogant335 as to their own ability and infallibility as to be comparable only to the Jews and the Roman Catholics in their unshakeable conviction that they alone possess truth. As to production generally out here. This country is now at a crossroads. Up to date they have had a damn fine war. On British dollars. Every last one of them. The result has been a magnificent boom after long years of black depression and despair … They lose no opportunity of impressing upon us individually how magnificently they are fighting [sic] and how inept, inefficient and idiotic and cowardly is our conduct of those few miserable efforts we ourselves are making in battle and in industry … Such production of war materials as has been achieved up to date has therefore been all to their profit and in no way to their inconvenience … They will come in when they think that we have won it. Not before. Just like they did last time. They will then tell the world how they did it. Just like they did last time.

If Harris’s tone was absurdly splenetic, it was a matter of fact that Britain and France provided the surge of investment that launched America’s wartime boom. In 1939, U.S. gross national output was still below its 1929 level. Anglo-French weapons orders and cash thereafter galvanised U.S. industry, even before Roosevelt’s huge domestic arms programme took effect. Between 1938 and the end of 1942 average income per family in Boston rose from $2,418 to $3,618 and in Los Angeles from $2,031 to $3,469, figures admittedly boosted by inflation and longer working hours. It could be argued—and indeed was, by the likes of Harris—that Britain exhausted its gold and foreign currency reserves to fund America’s resurrection from the Depression.

In London, ministers and generals found it irksome to be required to lavish extravagant courtesies upon transatlantic visitors. Hugh Dalton grumbled about attending a party given at the Savoy by the Sunday Express for American broadcaster Raymond Gram Swing: “It is just a little humiliating336, though we shall soon get more and more used to this sort of thing, that the majority of the Ministers of the Crown plus foreign diplomats, British generals and every kind of notability in the press world have to be collected