[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.That, of course, includedBritain and France.On November 4, 1939, Congress had passed theNeutrality Act, which allowed purchases of war matériel only on a cashand carry basis.Seven months later France fell to the Nazi onslaught, and Britainstood alone.In the summer of 1940 Germany proved unable to defeat 350 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THthe Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain and thus gain the air superi-ority necessary to mount an invasion across the English Channel.It triedinstead to bludgeon Britain into submission with the blitz and to forceBritain into submission by cutting off its trade lifelines across theAtlantic.It nearly worked.As Rudyard Kipling had explained decadesearlier:For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble,The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,They are brought to you daily by all us Big SteamersAnd if any one hinders our coming you ll starve!While the Royal Navy was far larger than the Kriegsmarine in totaltonnage, it was critically short in escort vessels to protect convoysagainst U-boat attack.As early as May 15, 1940, the new prime minister,Winston Churchill, was undiplomatically frank regarding what Britainneeded from the United States to survive. Immediate needs, he wrote, are: first of all, the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers.Sec-ondly, we want several hundred of the latest types of aircraft.Thirdly, anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition.Fourthly, [weneed] to purchase steel in the United States.This also applies to othermaterials.We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can, but Ishould like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, youwill give us the stuff all the same. Roosevelt realized what was at stake in terms of America s own secu-rity.He knew that Germany was no immediate threat to the UnitedStates, safe behind the vast Atlantic.But he also knew that a triumphantNazi state, lord of the Old World and all its economic and manpowerresources, would be a mortal threat to the peace and liberty of the NewWorld in the not-too-distant future.The president felt that Britain mustsurvive long enough to hold the Nazis at bay while the United States The Second World War351rearmed, and he was able to bring the American people around to seewhere their true interests lay.The day after receiving Churchill s letter, he appeared before a jointsession of Congress and asked for a supplemental defense appropriationof $1.3 billion, a very considerable increase in the total federal budget forthat year.He also asked for the production of at least 50,000 planes ayear. At the time American military forces were puny.The army had aboutthree hundred thousand soldiers fewer than Yugoslavia and was soshort of weapons that new recruits often had to drill with broomsticksinstead of rifles.The equipment it did have was often so antiquated thatthe chief of staff, General George C.Marshall, thought the army no bet-ter than that of a third-rate power. The navy, while equal to Britain s insize, lacked ammunition to sustain action, and much of its equipmentwas old or unreliable.On September 16, 1940, Congress approved the first peacetime draftin American history, and 16.4 million men between the ages of twentyand thirty-five registered.The act called for the training of 1.2 millionsoldiers and 800,000 reserves in the next year.But it specified that nonewas to serve outside the Western Hemisphere and that their terms of ser-vice were not to exceed twelve months.Getting congressional and public approval for measures to increasethe country s military preparedness was much easier than gettingapproval for aiding Britain.Roosevelt, at no small political risk to him-self, for the election of 1940 was only months away, agreed to transferfifty destroyers to Great Britain in exchange for fifty-year leases on basesin British New World possessions.And, more important, he began toformulate an all-aid-short-of-war strategy that he presented to the peopleas the best way to avoid war itself.Even before Roosevelt s arsenal of democracy talk, Britain s finan-cial situation was getting desperate.Britain s dollar and gold reserves 352 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THwere approaching exhaustion.On his return from Britain on November23, the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, was blunt, to put it mildly,when he told the reporters who met his plane, Well, boys, Britain sbroke.It s your money we want. In his State of the Union speech to Congress on January 6, 1941,Roosevelt declared that his policies were aimed at protecting the essentialhuman freedoms of speech and religion and freedom from fear andwant.He proposed what soon became known as Lend-Lease.Churchill,a month later, would memorably if disingenuously describe Lend-Leaseas a matter of Give us the tools and we will finish the job. Roosevelt, afew days earlier, had described it a bit more prosaically, but no less disin-genuously, as the equivalent of lending a neighbor whose house was onfire a garden hose, expecting to get it back when the fire was out.Congress, after a great national debate, approved Lend-Lease onMarch 11, appropriating $7 billion.By the end of the war, Lend-Leaseaid to the Allies would amount to $50,226,845,387.Churchill called itthe most unsordid act in the history of any nation. It was also, ofcourse, an act of singularly enlightened self-interest.It not only helpedthe Allies battle Germany and Japan effectively, it also did not create avast and unpayable debt that would be an impediment to Americanaction in the postwar world as the First World War debts had been in theprevious decades.Britain was still very short of escort vessels, and the Battle of theAtlantic showed signs of going Germany s way in 1941.Hemmed in bypublic opinion and congressional restrictions, Roosevelt maneuveredaround them.While American warships did not attack GermanU-boats, American sightings, by both plane and ship, were passed on tothe British.In a move of deft politics if dubious geography, Roosevelt gotaround the restriction against posting American military personnel out-side the Western Hemisphere by simply declaring Greenland and Ice-land to be part of the Western Hemisphere, and he stationed patrolaircraft there. The Second World War353Slowly the United States became more and more involved in safe-guarding the Atlantic sea lanes, and the USS Greer was attacked in Ice-landic waters on September 4.The USS Reuben James was sunk by aGerman torpedo on October 30.But isolationism was still a potent forcein American politics.On August 18 the extension of the Selective ServiceAct had passed the House by a single vote, 203 202 [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]
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.That, of course, includedBritain and France.On November 4, 1939, Congress had passed theNeutrality Act, which allowed purchases of war matériel only on a cashand carry basis.Seven months later France fell to the Nazi onslaught, and Britainstood alone.In the summer of 1940 Germany proved unable to defeat 350 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THthe Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain and thus gain the air superi-ority necessary to mount an invasion across the English Channel.It triedinstead to bludgeon Britain into submission with the blitz and to forceBritain into submission by cutting off its trade lifelines across theAtlantic.It nearly worked.As Rudyard Kipling had explained decadesearlier:For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble,The sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,They are brought to you daily by all us Big SteamersAnd if any one hinders our coming you ll starve!While the Royal Navy was far larger than the Kriegsmarine in totaltonnage, it was critically short in escort vessels to protect convoysagainst U-boat attack.As early as May 15, 1940, the new prime minister,Winston Churchill, was undiplomatically frank regarding what Britainneeded from the United States to survive. Immediate needs, he wrote, are: first of all, the loan of forty or fifty of your older destroyers.Sec-ondly, we want several hundred of the latest types of aircraft.Thirdly, anti-aircraft equipment and ammunition.Fourthly, [weneed] to purchase steel in the United States.This also applies to othermaterials.We shall go on paying dollars for as long as we can, but Ishould like to feel reasonably sure that when we can pay no more, youwill give us the stuff all the same. Roosevelt realized what was at stake in terms of America s own secu-rity.He knew that Germany was no immediate threat to the UnitedStates, safe behind the vast Atlantic.But he also knew that a triumphantNazi state, lord of the Old World and all its economic and manpowerresources, would be a mortal threat to the peace and liberty of the NewWorld in the not-too-distant future.The president felt that Britain mustsurvive long enough to hold the Nazis at bay while the United States The Second World War351rearmed, and he was able to bring the American people around to seewhere their true interests lay.The day after receiving Churchill s letter, he appeared before a jointsession of Congress and asked for a supplemental defense appropriationof $1.3 billion, a very considerable increase in the total federal budget forthat year.He also asked for the production of at least 50,000 planes ayear. At the time American military forces were puny.The army had aboutthree hundred thousand soldiers fewer than Yugoslavia and was soshort of weapons that new recruits often had to drill with broomsticksinstead of rifles.The equipment it did have was often so antiquated thatthe chief of staff, General George C.Marshall, thought the army no bet-ter than that of a third-rate power. The navy, while equal to Britain s insize, lacked ammunition to sustain action, and much of its equipmentwas old or unreliable.On September 16, 1940, Congress approved the first peacetime draftin American history, and 16.4 million men between the ages of twentyand thirty-five registered.The act called for the training of 1.2 millionsoldiers and 800,000 reserves in the next year.But it specified that nonewas to serve outside the Western Hemisphere and that their terms of ser-vice were not to exceed twelve months.Getting congressional and public approval for measures to increasethe country s military preparedness was much easier than gettingapproval for aiding Britain.Roosevelt, at no small political risk to him-self, for the election of 1940 was only months away, agreed to transferfifty destroyers to Great Britain in exchange for fifty-year leases on basesin British New World possessions.And, more important, he began toformulate an all-aid-short-of-war strategy that he presented to the peopleas the best way to avoid war itself.Even before Roosevelt s arsenal of democracy talk, Britain s finan-cial situation was getting desperate.Britain s dollar and gold reserves 352 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THwere approaching exhaustion.On his return from Britain on November23, the British ambassador, Lord Lothian, was blunt, to put it mildly,when he told the reporters who met his plane, Well, boys, Britain sbroke.It s your money we want. In his State of the Union speech to Congress on January 6, 1941,Roosevelt declared that his policies were aimed at protecting the essentialhuman freedoms of speech and religion and freedom from fear andwant.He proposed what soon became known as Lend-Lease.Churchill,a month later, would memorably if disingenuously describe Lend-Leaseas a matter of Give us the tools and we will finish the job. Roosevelt, afew days earlier, had described it a bit more prosaically, but no less disin-genuously, as the equivalent of lending a neighbor whose house was onfire a garden hose, expecting to get it back when the fire was out.Congress, after a great national debate, approved Lend-Lease onMarch 11, appropriating $7 billion.By the end of the war, Lend-Leaseaid to the Allies would amount to $50,226,845,387.Churchill called itthe most unsordid act in the history of any nation. It was also, ofcourse, an act of singularly enlightened self-interest.It not only helpedthe Allies battle Germany and Japan effectively, it also did not create avast and unpayable debt that would be an impediment to Americanaction in the postwar world as the First World War debts had been in theprevious decades.Britain was still very short of escort vessels, and the Battle of theAtlantic showed signs of going Germany s way in 1941.Hemmed in bypublic opinion and congressional restrictions, Roosevelt maneuveredaround them.While American warships did not attack GermanU-boats, American sightings, by both plane and ship, were passed on tothe British.In a move of deft politics if dubious geography, Roosevelt gotaround the restriction against posting American military personnel out-side the Western Hemisphere by simply declaring Greenland and Ice-land to be part of the Western Hemisphere, and he stationed patrolaircraft there. The Second World War353Slowly the United States became more and more involved in safe-guarding the Atlantic sea lanes, and the USS Greer was attacked in Ice-landic waters on September 4.The USS Reuben James was sunk by aGerman torpedo on October 30.But isolationism was still a potent forcein American politics.On August 18 the extension of the Selective ServiceAct had passed the House by a single vote, 203 202 [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]