He thought about it for a while, and then came up with his plan for giving the British whatever they needed free of charge. He called it “lend-lease.” Afterward scholars were able to track down the origins of the phrase: in May 1940 Bullitt had proposed that the U.S. “lease” warships to France, and in August Ickes argued that to transfer warships to England was to “lend” a fire extinguisher to a neighbor whose house was on fire. In December 1940 the idea emerged whole from the President’s head, and once he had told newsmen that sending supplies to Britain was—in his and Ickes’s immensely persuasive analogy—like lending a garden hose to a neighbor whose house was on fire, the campaign for public support was won.
Of course, it was a misnomer: the supplies sent to Britain pursuant to the new program were neither loaned nor leased; they were given. Senator Taft pointed that out, in a fight (in which he was joined by Vandenberg, Nye, and Wheeler in the Senate, and outside it by Herbert Hoover, Alfred Landon, and Thomas Dewey) to prevent enactment of lend-lease; but the Congress, urged on also by Wendell Willkie, passed the necessary legislation, which shrewdly had been numbered Bill 1776.
BOTH ROOSEVELT AND HOPKINS were intensely curious about Churchill, if somewhat skeptical. Roosevelt had been introduced to him once, but that was more than twenty years earlier, a fleeting and inconsequential encounter. In those days Roosevelt had been of so little importance in world affairs compared with Churchill that the famous Englishman had taken no notice of him and now was under the impression that they had never met. (This hurt Roosevelt’s feelings, and upon realizing it, the prime minister decided that he remembered FDR well.)
As for Hopkins, he had little experience of foreigners or of foreign countries, and was suspicious of them. But as FDR wanted to get a personal sense of what Churchill really was like—as a human being and as a politician—and of what his beliefs and goals were, Hopkins, though he hated air travel, volunteered to fly to London to spend time with the prime minister and report back.
The trip to London took five days. On arrival he interviewed Edward R. Murrow, telling him off the record that “I’ve come here to try to be a catalytic agent between two prima donnas.” He went to the Foreign Office and met the incoming foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, and then the outgoing one, Lord Halifax, who was being sent out to Washington as ambassador. He was put off by Eden’s upper-class dandy manner and found Halifax “a hopeless Tory,” which would not matter during the war, but (Hopkins wrote to Roosevelt) “I should not like to see him have much to say about a later peace—I should like to have Eden say less.”
Hopkins then met Churchill, with whom he took lunch. “I told him,” wrote Hopkins, “there was a feeling in some quarters that he, Churchill, did not like America, Americans, or Roosevelt. This set him off on a bitter tho fairly constrained attack on Ambassador Kennedy who he believes is responsible for this impression. He denied it vigorously.…”
Hopkins spent days and nights with Churchill as the prime minister went about directing the war, holding meetings, receiving reports, and dining with friends and colleagues. Hopkins met all sorts of other people, too, in and out of the government. He stayed at a hotel in Mayfair, still a center of London nightlife, though lit up now not by the limelight of floorshows, but by explosions and fires, and noisy not with revelry but with the drone of warplane engines, the wail of sirens, and the many sounds of aerial bombardment. He noted that German bombs spared nobody, that they had struck working-class neighborhoods but also Buckingham Palace and Downing Street. He observed that Churchill’s sleeping quarters, across the street from the prime minister’s official residence, did not provide the British leader with time out from the blitz—though a bomb shelter was in the process of being built that at last would allow him to sleep in peace.
Hopkins wrote out in longhand a letter to the President briefly summarizing his findings: “The people here are amazing from Churchill down and if courage alone can win—the result will be inevitable. But they need our help desperately and I am sure you will let nothing stand in the way.… Churchill is the gov’t in every sense of the word—he controls the grand strategy and often the details—labor trusts him—the army, navy, air force are behind him to a man. The politicians and upper crust pretend to like him.…” These were meaningful words from a working-class American predisposed to dislike English aristocrats and their airs.
“I cannot believe that it is true that Churchill dislikes either you or America—it just doesn’t make sense.…”
Hopkins ordinarily did not offer advice to Roosevelt. His role was to understand more perfectly than anyone else the workings of the President’s mind: to grasp what it was that FDR wanted done, and then to do it. But now he came close to advocating a course of action. To the man to whom he was closest in the world, he wrote: “This island needs our help now Mr. President with everything we can give them.”
“… AMERICA’S WORLD DUTY could be successfully performed only in partnership with Britain”: these words, addressed by Hopkins to his British hosts in the course of an off-the-record speech given to newspaper owners and executives, forecast the relationship that was about to develop.
It was Churchill who made the relationship possible, not merely because he represented so clean and complete a break with Britain’s appeasement past that Hopkins felt Roosevelt could trust him, but because he realized his world had changed—so much so that England now could survive only with American support. To obtain that support was one of his chief concerns.
Without knowing the President, Churchill somehow recognized that Roosevelt would tolerate no equals; so he made it clear that he deferred to FDR. He did not claim an entirely balanced partnership. On January 19, during the Hopkins visit, the prime minister called FDR on the telephone. He began: “Mr. President, it’s me—Winston—speaking.…”
AT THE END OF HIS SIX-WEEK TRIP, Hopkins brought back to Washington a shopping list of supplies urgently needed by Britain. Waiting to meet Hopkins as his plane landed was his friend W. Averell Harriman, who pleaded for a job in the war effort and offered to do anything as an aide to Hopkins, including carry his bags. He had bungled his role in the Great War and now seized his second chance.
Hopkins talked to Roosevelt, who sent for Harriman and appointed him lend-lease “expediter” in London—the personal link between Britain’s government and Hopkins, who would oversee the lend-lease program from the White House. As Hopkins’s man in London, would Harriman report through the State Department or directly to the White House? “I don’t know,” Roosevelt told journalists who asked, “and I don’t give a damn, you know.”
WHILE HOPKINS was setting up the program under which the American economy was mobilizing behind the British war effort, the uniformed heads of America’s armed forces were forging their own transatlantic alliance. The initiative came from an old friend of FDR’s, Admiral Harold R. Stark, chief of naval operations, who submitted a memorandum to the President just after the November 1940 elections in which he argued that the continued existence of the British empire was vital to the defense of the Western Hemisphere. He asked Roosevelt to choose between the options that would confront the United States if the country were drawn into a two-ocean war against Germany and Japan, and he asked permission to engage in staff talks with Britain’s military chiefs in order to formulate joint contingency plans.
Typically the President took no position with respect to the memorandum. He would not say which of the four strategic options he would choose: priority to the Atlantic, priority to the Pacific, split the fleet evenly between the two, or withdraw from both. But FDR, without approving, did not object to the staff talks Stark proposed.
Delegates from the British chiefs of staff secretly came to the United States at the end of January 1941. In the course of talks with American military leaders over the next two months, they arrived at a common strategy that they would propose to their two governments in the event that the United States were to enter the war against Germany.
Meanwhile, the President explained the current strategy to the American people in terms anyone could understand. “A nation can have peace with the Nazis only at the price of total surrender …,” he said; so Germany must be stopped. He explained the existing division of labor between the United States and Britain in a ringing phrase, suggested by Hopkins: “We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” America would supply the wherewithal for England to defeat Germany.
Churchill said the same thing in his own way: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.” He said that “in the last war the United States sent two million men across the Atlantic. But this is not a war of vast armies.… We do not need the gallant armies which are forming throughout the American Union. We do not need them this year, nor next year; nor any year that I can foresee.”
Though many doubted at the time, and at least some doubt it still, Churchill seems to have been telling the truth about what he believed in early 1941. At the time, it was what FDR seems to have believed, too. Both leaders still held an exaggerated faith in what could be accomplished by air power alone. Neither of them foresaw the need to send an American Expeditionary Force to Europe.
One of the best clues to Roosevelt’s thinking is provided by Robert Sherwood, who spent much time in the White House as one of Roosevelt’s speechwriters. He wrote that as FDR worked on speeches, “he would look up at the portrait of Woodrow Wilson over the mantelpiece. The tragedy of Wilson was always somewhere within the rim of his consciousness. Roosevelt could never forget Wilson’s mistakes … and there was no motivating force in all of Roosevelt’s wartime political policy stronger than the determination to prevent repetition of the same mistakes.”
One of Wilson’s great mistakes, it was widely believed in 1941, had been to send the American army overseas. To the extent that FDR had thought things through in 1941—although his tendency mostly was to not think things through—he seems to have believed that even if the United States went to war, it would not wage it on the ground. He believed that if drawn into the fighting, the United States would continue to supply Britain’s military needs while waging a purely naval and air force war.
Hopkins told Roosevelt that Churchill was of the same view: “He believes that this war will never see great forces massed against one another.” Churchill believed that the war would be won by an overwhelming preponderance of air power.
The immediate question, as in the Great War, was how to protect the Atlantic sea-lanes against German U-boats. Pressed by Knox and Stimson, the President on April 10, 1941, moved the eastern boundary of the American “defense zone” in the Atlantic Ocean—an area forbidden to foreign warships—to the twenty-sixth meridian, to include the Azores; but he still would not authorize the escorting of convoys.
THROUGHOUT 1940 AND 1941 there was widespread public debate in the United States about staying out of the European war.
The Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies was formed in the spring of 1940 by William Allen White, editor of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette, with assistance from Clark Eichelberger, national director of the League of Nations Association. As its name suggested, the White committee argued that supplying Britain and letting her do the fighting was the best way to keep the United States from being attacked.
The Century Association group, which played so great a role in pushing through the destroyers-for-bases arrangement, seceded from the White committee. Its members believed that Britain, even if well supplied, could not defeat Germany on her own. They felt the United States had to enter the war to win it.
The America First Committee, also formed in 1940, claimed a membership of 800,000 and was led by, among others, aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh. Like his congressman father in the Great War, Lindbergh opposed American intervention against Germany. His committee drew support from people who were opposed to the administration’s policy from a variety of points of view. There were true isolationists: people, in other words, who believed in defending only the Western Hemisphere. Then there were those who, though internationalists, believed the United States should act on its own rather than in alliance with foreign countries, or (though these tended to overlap) who gave priority to the Pacific and Asia rather than to the Atlantic and Europe. There were left-wingers, Progressives, and pacifists like Robert Maynard Hutchins of the University of Chicago, who still believed, as they had in the early 1930s, that wars were started by and served only the interests of imperialists and arms manufacturers. And there were right-wingers, pro-Nazis, pro-Germans, Anglophobes, and anti-Semites. Their cause was spearheaded by Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune.
As in the years leading up to American entry into the Great War, though to a much lesser extent, arguments about policy and principle sometimes cloaked what really were regional or ethnic differences. Thus the anti-Roosevelt coalition of Republicans and old-guard southern Democrats that at times controlled the Senate disintegrated on the lend-lease issue when the South defected; for the old Confederacy was the most pro-British section of the country.
The President seemed, as he had all along, to be led by public opinion, which on the whole rejected the views of both America First and the Century and overwhelmingly favored a strategy of giving England all aid—but short of war.
THE GERMAN ARMY’S 1941 campaign season began March 1, when its troops crossed the Danube from Hungary to Romania on pontoon bridges. German forces were moving south, passing by permission through Balkan states of the Axis alliance, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, toward Greece and the Mediterranean. On April 6, before dawn, German warplanes struck crippling blows at Greece and Yugoslavia; waves of Nazi invaders then flooded into both countries at sunrise.
The Yugoslav army surrendered April 17. The Greek army gave up on April 27. The last remnants of the British army in Greece were evacuated from the beaches by the end of April. Mainland Greece and all of the islands except Crete were in German or Italian hands by May 11. The British threw in additional forces to make a stand in Crete, but suffered disaster; German paratroops landed on the island May 20 and overcame the last pocket of resistance eleven days later.
The Germans seemed invincible. With summertime weather still ahead of them, the question was only where they would march next. Rumors and even some hard information pointed toward the Soviet Union; but an invasion of the British Isles seemed to make more sense.
The British empire in the Arab world seemed to be collapsing. A single German division under General Erwin Rommel, sent to rescue beleaguered Italians in Libya, drove Britain’s Middle Eastern armies all the way back to the Egyptian frontier, threatening to cut the imperial lifeline: the Suez Canal. At the same time, pro-Nazi Arab nationalist officers seized power in Iraq; British troops and their local allies scrambled as quickly as they could to regain the upper hand, but for a while it looked as though the empire’s land road to India, too, had been severed.
So FDR could not be sure in the spring of 1941 that Britain would survive. Though Stimson continued to push him to assign American warships to convoy duty, Roosevelt resisted; his first priority was to hold the Atlantic as a shield protecting the Western Hemisphere. Helping Britain took second place to that. Moreover, American war production was not yet at levels adequate to supply both Britain and the United States should a convoy system lead to war.
THE WALL STREET EXECUTIVES and lawyers that Stimson and Knox had brought into government to administer the American military buildup found in Washington a city and a life very different from what they had left. The capital city was backward, and suffered from being at once a small town and an overcrowded city. Its facilities for transportation, entertainment, and social life were limited both in quality and in quantity.
It went without saying that the social life of fine manners and elevated conversation presided over by Nannie Lodge and Elizabeth Cameron in the days of the Republican Roosevelt was as faded as the leaves of a nineteenth-century scrapbook. The Democratic Roosevelt and his wife set almost as unsocial an e
xample as the Wilsons had; meals served by them at the White House were notoriously bad, and the cocktails the President took such pride in mixing were mediocre. One reason that Hopkins had been surprised to find Churchill enjoying the house-party company of witty, learned, and talented people on weekends, when he allowed himself to relax, was that it was so different from what he was used to back in Washington: Roosevelt disliked social life and preferred to go to sleep well before midnight.
Washington was a one-industry, one-company town, and it was not easy for the wives who arrived from Manhattan to adjust to a life that was so much less than metropolitan. They found themselves suddenly deprived of theater, opera, art galleries, fashion houses, nightclubs, and a galaxy of restaurants, and stranded in a town in which all conversation centered on their husbands’ work.
Worst hit of all seemed to be Josephine Forrestal, wife of the hard-driving investment banker who now filled the position that Franklin Roosevelt had held in the 1917 war, with a higher title (undersecretary of the navy, rather than assistant secretary) but also much greater responsibilities. It was his job to help Frank Knox streamline the antiquated Navy Department and try to turn America’s peacetime navy into the most powerful fighting fleet in the world in a hurry. A man who moved with the coiled tension of a jungle cat about to spring, Forrestal worked at his job sixteen hours a day.
Fear and anxiety caused by the war, and especially the terrifying news of the apparently unstoppable sweep of German armor across the face of Europe, is said by Forrestal’s latest biographers to have been at the back of the breakdown Mrs. Forrestal suffered. There were more specific sources of strain as well, among them the need to hold her own in lunchtime and dinnertime conversations about politics, a subject in which she took no interest and did not feel at home.
In the Time of the Americans Page 55