CHAPTER 10
ON 11 December 1941 Hitler declared war on the United States of America. In retrospect the actual participation of the United States in the war in Europe and the hugeness of its contribution to victory obscure the fact that, all through 1941, the United States was still largely unwilling to become a belligerent. Many Americans felt that the war was not theirs, in the sense that it could affect no vital American interest; and those who nevertheless felt emotionally involved hoped that they could contribute to the defeat of the dictators without having to send their own sons to be killed.
Europeans have become used, during the twentieth century, to describing their wars as World wars, the implication being that everybody of any consequence automatically gets involved once Europeans start fighting. To many Europeans in both World wars American participation took the form of a belated recognition of the obvious. But it was not obvious that a European war must become a World war or that the United States must send fighting men to Europe. Even after the United States became a belligerent Americans regarded their country’s intervention as assistance to friends in need rather than as the defence of essential American interests. There was a lot to be said for this view. The American continent was a long way from Europe. It could not be hit or invaded by German air or land forces and could only be marginally harassed by naval ones. Hitler showed in any case no desire to do any of these things. There was (save from Japan) no external threat to the United States, no enemy within sight. Moreover this commonsensical geographical view of the matter fitted comfortably into American history and mythology – the creation of the United States as a society detached from Europe and its ills, a community which had better things to do than get involved in the deceits and squabbles which constituted European politics.
Not that the United States had in fact been as isolationist as it believed itself, and was believed by others, to be. In the famous debates in the Senate after the end of the First World War about adopting the Treaty of Versailles and joining the League of Nations there had at no time been a majority against the new internationalism. Debate had been about the conditions to be attached to ratifying the treaty, and the combined forces of those who wanted unconditional acceptance and those who wanted conditional acceptance decisively outnumbered the isolationists who wanted no acceptance at all. The entry of the United States into the League was vetoed by the Senate only because the compact body of Wilsonian internationalist Senators joined forces with the small band of isolationists to defeat the amendments proposed by Republican internationalists. The event was decided by Wilson’s determination to have all or nothing. The Senate’s action was nevertheless interpreted as a signal of American withdrawal. Nor was this interpretation altogether wrong, for the League became the principal outward and visible sign and the principal organ of international involvement, and it never had the United States among its members. Yet the United States was willy-nilly enmeshed in European affairs because of the war debts owed to it by its recent allies, debts which these allies could not pay unless they in their turn were paid the war reparations owed to them by Germany. Consequently the United States took an active part in the attempts to sort out these problems, so much so that the two main plans for settling the German debt – the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan – were named after the American members of the teams which produced them. But this special kind of involvement, backward looking to the last war, was no pointer to a wider international involvement. On the contrary, it kept alive memories of the unpleasantness of war and added to them resentments about allies who, after the war, defaulted on their financial engagements.
Further than that, there grew up in the United States a suspicion that the American declaration of war in April 1917 had been engineered by chicanery. Catastrophic events tend to breed, a generation later, a critique which probes for hidden, and perhaps disreputable, motives. Americans were perturbed by the notion that the arms industry – the merchants of death as they were more picturesquely called before the invention of the sterner term military-industrial complex – had promoted belligerence for the profits to be made out of it, while yet other Americans blamed Wilson for feebly succumbing to cunning allied propaganda about the wickedness of U-boats. Criticisms of this nature became so strong that they were investigated, and given added circulation, by a committee of the Senate – the Nye Committee – between 1934 and 1936. This scrutiny contributed to the mood which induced Congress to pass the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936 and 1937. These Acts were intended to make clear the American resolve to keep out of another war and to prevent a President from leading the nation into one. Neutrality, a posture usually adopted by small states to avoid getting hurt in the quarrels of the great, became paradoxically the statutory refuge of the greatest power on earth. In order to give body to this general policy the Congress decreed that American arms were not to be delivered to belligerents or to be carried in American ships (but belligerents might buy non-military goods provided they paid cash for them and carried them away in non-American vessels); further, the President was empowered to take other precautionary measures by, for example, forbidding American citizens to travel in belligerent ships. It was in implementation of these Acts that Roosevelt issued in September 1939 a declaration of American neutrality.
There has been much debate over the attitudes of the American people towards external affairs, and even more about President Roosevelt’s role in leading his country towards war. American isolationism was, as already noted, rooted in history and plausibility. The United States came into existence as a result of war against a European power and was peopled by migrants who left Europe out of distaste or discomfort. With an enormous and comparatively empty country to explore and exploit they concluded, as well they might, that other people’s affairs were of no account and that they themselves had no vital interests beyond their own bounds (with the exception of the central American and Caribbean lands to the south which were not so distant as not to matter). The threat to the Union in the 1860s and the problems of reconstruction after the Civil War intensified the tendency to introspection, but two forces in particular were working against it. The first was the diversification of American economic interests and their consequent expansion overseas, coupled with a growth in American power which both tempted and enabled the United States to scan larger horizons. These material considerations were reinforced by the moralistic ingredient in American society, a factor in the American make-up which derived partly from the puritan origins of many of its communities and partly from that remoteness from events which allowed Americans to think of external politics in general terms of right and wrong instead of the more pragmatic categories of expediency and prudence to which Europeans, with their eyes on close neighbours and sensitive frontiers, were more prone.
This moralistic trend found expression, in political affairs, in a self-dedication to freedom and democracy, and this dedication made nonsense of isolationism. The isolationist attitude had found expression in neutrality, which is the formal expression of the emotion of isolationism. Covertly, however, neutrality negated isolationism, for whereas isolationism asserted that other people’s conflicts could be overlooked, neutrality could mean that they were looked at and found to be equally lacking in merit on both sides. Thus neutrality was a Trojan horse in the isolationist camp, since Europe between the wars proved on inspection not to be an arena where unregenerate Europeans were simply tangling over issues of no significance. On the contrary, Fascism threatened democracy, Nazism threatened even more basic human norms; there were fights abroad in which all good men must join to put down brutality and faithlessness and uphold democracy and civilized manners. So a conflict developed within the United States. As the troubles of Europe and Asia became more troubled (by, for example, the Japanese attacks on Manchuria and China and the Spanish civil war), there was an atavistic and very powerful resolve to keep all the clearer of them, but at the same time a minority which concerned itself with foreign affairs developed a strong reprobation of the aggressive and fascist powers. Being neutral turned out to be more difficult than it used to be. To most Americans neutrality meant keeping out of wars, but to some Americans it began to appear that neutrality in Hitler’s wars meant keeping out of a just war. Keeping out of wars was self-evidently sensible, but keeping out of a just war was not so clearly right.
The debate over Roosevelt’s personal responsibility in bringing the United States into war has been not untinged by the emotions roused by Roosevelt in issues which have nothing to do with the war. Roosevelt was one of those men who can instil passionate enthusiasms and also intense hostility, even hatred. By his keenest admirers he has been credited with the foresight of genius; to his bitter enemies he was little better than a charlatan. The only common ground here is the acknowledgement that he had uncommon influence over the course of events. This is not the place for a complete assessment of Roosevelt as President, but we have to inquire into the nature of his influence, the use he made of it and the evolution of his policy in relation to international crises and to war.
Roosevelt was elected President in 1932 in the wake of exceptional turmoil in the United States. Although Americans had no external enemy to fear, they had experienced another kind of fear and disaster. The economic collapse which began so dramatically on Wall Street on 23 October 1929 took away from millions the basic material conditions of their lives and left them feeling helpless, bewildered and scared. The shock to morale was all the greater because, unlike the soldier who in some sense covenants with death, the brusquely impoverished father of a family had not contemplated this material bereavement, had done nothing to deserve it and scarcely understood it. There was more panic in the face of this economic blast than in the face of rifle fire or bombs. It was up to Roosevelt to do something about it and he did do, and was seen to do, lots of things. Not all these things were useful or even sensible but all of them, the failures as well as the successes, were activities and activity was a large part of what was needed. One can argue about the value of planting thousands of trees or of creating new government agencies, but it is impossible to doubt that the sum total of sheer activity by government became transmuted into a bank of popular confidence on which Roosevelt was ever afterwards able to draw. He became at once a strong President, capable of weathering storms and of giving a lead, the more so because the strength of his political position was buttressed by exceptional (though not infallible) political skill, superior intelligence and eloquence. But Roosevelt was no revolutionary or visionary innovator, either domestically or in foreign affairs. At home he was a compassionate, managerial conservative whose New Deal meant some change in the distribution of power, little change in the direction of policy. In external affairs his attitudes were at first no different from those of millions of Americans. He was an isolationist in the sense of wanting to keep out of foreign affairs on the assumption that these spelt trouble, but he was not opposed to playing a part where no trouble seemed to brew. Thus, he proposed in 1935 that the United States join the Permanent Court of International Justice, but was defeated by the Senate. He not only took an interest in disarmament but offered to join a European collective security system if the Europeans would first disarm. He was riled by the failure of the Disarmament Conference in 1933 and blamed Germany, which was seeking to increase its armament, rather than France or Great Britain, which were simply declining to reduce theirs. On the other hand he allowed Hitler’s introduction of conscription in 1935 to pass without protest even though it was a breach of the American-German peace treaty of 1921 (the treaty concluded by the United States in place of the Treaty of Versailles). Again like millions of Americans, Roosevelt, disposed though he was to criticize the fumbling policies and imperial philosophies of France and Great Britain, was coming to regard Nazi Germany as nastier and more dangerous – though not in the same devilish category as the USSR. The remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 added to the general uneasiness and to the share of blame to be attributed to Germany. Nazi anti-semitism also began to have its effect. It offended decent Gentiles as well as American Jewry (which counted for more than something in Roosevelt’s own state of New York), but on the other hand there was good business to be done with Germany and it entered nobody’s head in Washington that government could or should interfere with business. Roosevelt and the American people, like European leaders and peoples, were divided and unclear about trends in Europe during the thirties and about what initiatives, if any, to take in respect of them. But they were becoming increasingly anti-Nazi and so anti-German, and this trend was fed by the association of Japan with Germany. Both countries came to be seen as cruel and power-hungry, associated moreover not only by their domestic oppressiveness and external aggressiveness but also in their economic policies which were imposing a blatant economic hegemony in their respective spheres of influence in place of the American ethos of the Open Door which was not only more subtle and more amiable but also calculated to serve American commercial interests.
In November 1936 Roosevelt was re-elected President by a margin of 11 million votes (as against 7 million in 1932). Foreign affairs played little part in the electioneering and what Roosevelt had to say was along conventional keep-out-of-trouble lines. During his second term Roosevelt suffered a decline in popularity which was to be marked by the reduction of his majority to 5 million votes in 1940. The New Deal was not wholly successful and very far from being universally popular. The President’s tussle with the Supreme Court and the manoeuvres by which he tried to pack it lost him the support and respect of many who had been among his warmest admirers. Moreover, if tradition was anything to go by, he would cease to be President in 1940 because no President had ever tried to serve more than two terms. He was still a strong President and an intelligent and eloquent one, but his strength was flecked by failures and by the running out of his time. He was not well placed to innovate in foreign affairs, especially if innovation meant running a risk of war. But foreign affairs imposed themselves on his attention. The Japanese attack on China in 1937 with its reminder of the growth of Japanese power and the consequent threat to American power in the Pacific posed for Americans a problem of a special kind. In Great Britain, where it was axiomatic that a war against Germany, Italy and Japan at once would be suicidal, the question debated was whom to conciliate: many people’s first choice, notably in the Foreign Office, was Italy, but others, notably in the Treasury and in the services (the pledge that Australia and New Zealand would be protected from Japan by the Royal Navy was a constant consideration and was reaffirmed at the Imperial Conference of 1937) argued that the growth of Japanese power meant that Great Britain should revert to the alliance with Japan which had been abandoned after the First World War under American pressure. But Americans did not see Japan that way. An American-Japanese alliance was an impossibility and so American-Japanese rivalry created an external threat such as Hitler never posed. It was in the context of the Pacific and East Asia that the United States began to evolve a policy of meeting a threat by extending to an ally – in this case China – all aid short of war and within the Neutrality Act. Moreover, Japanese aggression affected American public opinion owing to the extent of pro-Chinese feeling in the United States.
Partly in response to these worries on his eastern flank and partly because he wanted to be useful, Roosevelt tried in the last two years of peace to mediate in European affairs. He thought of meeting Hitler (as, later, he would hope to resolve other problems by personal contact with Stalin). He proposed a conference of neutrals to discuss modes of international behaviour, disarmament and access to raw materials. Although offended by the manners and behaviour of the dictators, he thought of himself at this time as one of the neutrals rather than as one of the democrats. Nor did the leading democrats do much to swing him to their side. Chamberlain, deep in his ineffective attempts to make friends with Italy and Germany, did his best to head off the American President. He wanted no joint Anglo-American initiative and preferably no American initiative at all – at this point; for it is only fair to add that, under some pressure from cabinet colleagues and the British Ambassador in Washington, he kept up his correspondence with Roosevelt and left a way open for an American initiative later on. Roosevelt might have overridden these obstacles if he had had any clear idea of what to do, but beyond offering his good offices in a vague and general way he was essentially without a European policy. It was hardly possible for him to have such a policy so long as the precondition of all American activity in Europe was to minimize involvement. He did not intend to fight the dictators and there was at this time no government in Europe which wanted him to. He was reduced to following events – in both senses of that phrase. He had little faith in Chamberlain’s manoeuvring to avoid war over Czechoslovakia, but privately supported Chamberlain in the absence of anything else to do and publicly stated that the United States would not fight if France and Great Britain went to war for Czechoslovakia. Like most people he was relieved when war was avoided at Munich; like many people he was shocked by Hitler’s breach of the Munich agreement and the annihilation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. By this time his ineffectiveness in European affairs had strengthened Hitler’s view that he did not have to worry about the United States, but round about this same time Roosevelt was becoming convinced that war was certain and American involvement at least a possibility. Within six months war had started.
Whereas Churchill was temperamentally a man of action upon whom full responsibility fell after war had begun, Roosevelt was an intellectual in a situation of half-peace half-war. His country was not equipped for war militarily or industrially and his fellow citizens were not ready for it psychologically. His nature and his circumstances alike made him gingerly in pace, and it was only as circumstances developed that he was able to resolve his hesitations about what American opinion would endorse and what he himself ought to do. To Americans the war in Europe presented itself as a contest between Germany on the one hand and Great Britain and France on the other. The question was who would win. A second question was whether it mattered to the United States who won. At the outset Roosevelt established a distinction: the United States was formally a neutral but it cared about the result of the war and, since it cared, it should use ‘all methods short of war’ to help Great Britain and France to defeat Hitler. This position did not go unchallenged. A not inconsiderable part of the American press and a number of influential public figures were either hostile to Great Britain or entranced with Nazi ideas or genuinely indifferent. Anti-British and anti-imperial groups were, if limited, vocal. There was no surge of pro-British feeling until the Battle of Britain (in which a number of American volunteers took part in defiance of the laws of their country), and even the Battle of Britain had only moderate effect in the western United States and less still in the psychologically more remote Middle West. On the other hand pro-German propaganda was an almost complete failure. The German-American Bund never had more than 6,000 members and could not efface the image of the Nazi as a bully.
But however partisan Americans might become it still did not follow that they could see the war as one which affected American national interests. It was difficult to believe that the United States, bounded by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, was not also protected by them. To the ordinary American it appeared that, although there might be a moral case for helping the democracies to defeat Nazism, there were no strategic issues of self-interest which required the United States to make war. The argument, a familiar commonplace in Great Britain, that no state must be allowed to become all-powerful in Europe did not make sense to a people separated from Europe by the Atlantic Ocean and not merely by the English Channel. In the thirties the speeds which were to be reached within a generation and the weapons which were to annihilate distances as well as cities were undreamt of by all save a few.
If there was a danger it seemed more likely to emerge from Latin America. Recollecting perhaps German attempts in the First World War to get Mexico, in alliance with Japan, to make war on the United States, and greatly exaggerating the potential threat from the Germans settled in the southern parts of the American continent, the United States turned immediately on the outbreak of war to the problem of immunizing the New World from it. In October 1939 the American states met at Panama in an inter-American conference and agreed to quarantine the New World by proscribing transfers of territory within it from one European power to another and by designating a security zone extending 300–1,000 miles seaward from its eastern shores. Belligerents were required to abjure naval operations in this area. Great Britain, France and Germany contested the legality of this declaration but the British soon ceased to complain when they discovered that the United States was prepared to connive at infractions of the ban, even to the extent of helping to detect and locate German vessels.
Latin American attitudes to the war were compounded of three main strands. Through the historical Spanish connection and indigenous anti-communism there was sympathy for Franco and, by extension, for his fellow dictators in Europe. There was antipathy to the British blockade of European markets and, among the wealthier classes, grousing about the reduction in imported luxuries. Thirdly and perhaps most pertinently, all eyes were on Roosevelt and his manoeuvres between the traditional neutrality of the New World and his partiality for the democratic (if not the imperial) character of the anti-Axis allies. Pearl Harbor was therefore a climactic event since it precipitated the United States into open belligerence. Furthermore, many Latin Americans, while perceiving little real threat to their region from Germany, saw Japan as a more credible enemy. Within weeks of Pearl Harbor, all Latin America except Argentine and Chile broke off relations with Japan, Germany and Italy. Parts of Central America and the Caribbean were overrun by the United States in return for Lend-Lease and promises of financial and technical aid to sugar the pill of United States domination. Since Washington felt that this was no time for concern over the internal affairs of its neighbours, governments were strengthened by Washington’s benevolence and liberal and revolutionary aspirations were stifled even more effectively than in German-occupied Europe.
In Mexico – the most delicate area because of its border with the United States, its nationalization of foreign oil companies in 1938 and memories of Japanese meddling in the First World War – ingrained antipathies were overridden by the exigencies and opportunities of war (some Mexicans did well out of exports of gold and other minerals to the United States) and Mexico took the extreme step of declaring war in May 1942 after U-boat attacks which sank Mexican vessels, drowned Mexican citizens and created popular outcry and a rare party political unity. A Mexican air unit was sent to the Pacific in the last year of the war – in order, like Cavour’s dispatch of Sardinian troops to the Crimea, to raise Mexico’s international standing. Only Brazil, which declared war on the Axis powers in August 1942 and on Japan in May 1945, sent a force to Europe (to Italy in 1944). It emerged from the war with the largest slice of Lend-Lease to Latin America and the strongest armed forces. The other major South American countries, Argentina and Chile, were the least keen to declare war, partly because of their mutual quarrel over the islands off the southern tip of the continent. They became nominal belligerents in 1945 under the threat of exclusion from the conference convened at San Francisco to create the United Nations. In Argentina a by-product of the war was the overthrow in 1943 of civilian rule, an event which led eventually to the elevation to the presidency in 1946 of Colonel Juan Domingo Perón. Washington regarded the post-1943 military régime as fascist and pro-German and attacked it with an outspoken vigour which was unusual among sovereign states and seriously alarmed the British who, besides stigmatizing Washington’s handling of the situation as crude and crass, were nervous about the considerable British investments in Argentina and Great Britain’s dependence on it for the meat ration.
The dangers from the German population of Latin America were largely a product of war nerves. There were 300,000 German nationals (Reichsdeutsche) and 1.75 million persons of German extraction (Volksdeutsche) in the sub-continent, and Nazi propaganda and German trade had both been intensified in the thirties, but the likelihood and consequences of pro-German coups were alike exaggerated. Here, as in other parts of the world, the Reichsdeutsche in particular were regarded as a disciplined fifth column which had been prepared by the External Affairs Department of the Nazi Party to play an active role in war. But out of about three million Reichsdeutsche living outside the Reich only 30,000 had been enrolled by the party by 1939, and the belief in the sinister efficiency of these people was a myth, a projection of the German reputation for thoroughness coupled with the glamorous novelty of the idea of the fifth column, a term coined during the Spanish civil war. (Absurd stories were spread with hysterical waywardness in many countries, particularly in Europe; these stories were reported by most of the world’s leading newspapers and treated as undeniable by parliamentarians and others who raised a patriotic clamour for indiscriminate arrests; nobody was allowed to be what he seemed to be; thousands of innocent persons, including Jewish refugees from Germany, were seized and many of them were shot.)
In the two years and a bit which elapsed between Munich and the American elections of 1940 Roosevelt rearmed, tried to restore peace by diplomacy and gave what aid he could to the western allies. He had asked Congress in January 1938 for a 20 per cent increase in the navy allocations; his request had created an uproar but been granted. The same thing happened a year later when he asked for more money for the army and air forces. Early in 1940 he sent Under Secretary Sumner Welles on a tour of European capitals, sent a special emissary to the Vatican to initiate American-Papal mediation and tried to keep Italy out of the war. All these efforts were failures. The war went on and Ribbentrop, visiting Rome on the heels of Welles, extracted from Mussolini a promise to enter it at some unspecified date. The fall of France shifted American opinion, official and unofficial. After that catastrophe there was no significant opposition to huge and rapid rearmament, and a Selective Service Act was passed in September. The elimination of French power and the probable elimination (as it seemed) of British power too forced Americans to think about the consequences to themselves of the disappearance of two great friendly navies and the emergence of a new German-Italian naval power which had also annexed the French fleet. The United States made unconventionally strong representations to Pétain and his Navy Minister, Admiral Darlan, in order to prevent the French government from surrendering its fleet to Germany in the armistice negotiations. Here was a visible external threat similar to the growth of Japanese power in the Pacific. Roosevelt strengthened his cabinet by inviting two eminent Republicans, Henry L. Stimson (a former Secretary of State) and Frank Knox, to become his Secretaries of War and the Navy: unlike Churchill Roosevelt looked to the Right rather than the Left in constructing a war coalition.
When in 1940 it seemed that Hitler was winning the war rather easily Roosevelt still could do little to stop him. He had refused a request from the French government to send troops to Europe. But it was becoming plainer than ever that if Hitler was to be denied a complete victory more would be required of the United States than methods short of war. Helping the western allies meant ensuring the flow of traffic across the Atlantic against U-boats and German surface raiders. It meant supplies and protection; later it was to mean credit too. A first attempt to amend the Neutrality Act failed but Congress soon relented so far as to permit belligerents to buy military as well as non-military goods on a cash-and-carry basis. For the moment cash was not an immediate problem, but carrying was. Then, if the United States was to help protect the carriage, it would have to risk its own vessels and invite German retaliation, engaging in unneutral activities which might lead to war. Non-belligerence, which was essentially an attempt to get the best of two incompatible worlds – those of neutrality and partisanship – would be put at risk and would prove to be no more than the transitional stage from the one world to a full role in the other.
Roosevelt both saw and accepted the risks rather sooner than most people. Since the American people later proved by their actions that they accepted the consequences, Roosevelt might justly claim that his leadership had been endorsed and any deviousness which might have been involved condoned. But to some extent too his leadership determined the course. His simple presentation of the issues, his patience in unfolding his policies, his readiness to accept responsibility, and his calm handling of critical national decisions – for all the superficial detachment which he sometimes displayed as he turned from affairs of state to his stamp collection – these qualities inevitably led him to form and not merely observe the popular will. In which exercise of power he was giving an example of democratic leadership.
During 1940 Roosevelt resolved to seek a third term in the Presidency, an event not only unprecedented in American history but so obnoxious to American instincts that after the war it was prohibited by constitutional amendment. The war was not the only reason for this decision. He was deeply concerned to preserve the social innovations of the New Deal and he saw among leading figures in his own party no liberal Democrat upon whom he could rely to do this. But the conviction that the United States was going to become more deeply involved in war and that he should guide it also played a major part in his decision. At this stage Roosevelt developed the idea that the United States was in substance, if not formally, already under attack. He was a master of the art of democratic communication, and his regular fireside chats – one of the adroitest political uses of radio, which had at this period only been used effectively by politicians of a different stamp, Hitler and Mussolini – gave him the ear and the confidence of the people. They trusted him and when in 1940 they were asked to give him a third term 27 million of them decided to do so: his attractively unusual Republican opponent Wendell Wilkie (with whom in later years Roosevelt thought of making a progressive alliance and a new party) received 22 million votes, a big gap in a modern American presidential election. But it would be wrong to conclude that the 27 million who voted for Roosevelt did so because they were ready to fight against Hitler. They were with Roosevelt in wanting Hitler to be beaten – as were the great bulk of the 22 million who voted for Wilkie – but they wanted Hitler to be beaten by the British and were not yet convinced that the British could not do this without the United States as a fighting ally. Roosevelt himself still clung to the hope that the American role need not be a fighting one or that, if it came to fighting, the American share could be limited to sea and air and would not involve sending army conscripts overseas. During his campaign he promised again and again not to send Americans to fight in foreign lands ‘except in case of attack’ (on one occasion, subsequently much quoted against him, he left out the proviso) and there must have been many who voted for Roosevelt because he had kept the country out of war and who would have refused him a third term had they supposed that he would not continue to find ways of doing so. No opinion poll during the year before Pearl Harbor showed more than one in five Americans opting for war.
If in 1940 the defeat of France had been offset by the British success in the Battle of Britain, in 1941 the defeat of Great Britain became once more a possibility to be reckoned with. The threat to Great Britain at sea, which had come near to success in the First World War, was manifested on the first day of the Second when the German U-30 sank the British passenger ship Athenia (the victims included twenty-eight Americans). The threat at sea was posed by mines (laid by surface vessels, submarines or aircraft), surface raiders and U-boats. At the beginning of the war the magnetic mine did much damage to British shipping in coastal waters, but it was quickly mastered by technical counter-measures. Surface raiders, such as the pocket battleships Graf Spee and Deutschland whose exploits have already been narrated, caused much concern but comparatively little damage. The enduring enemy was the U-boat. Fortunately for the British, Doenitz’s fleet was a small one. He divided his boats between Atlantic and North Sea raiding and mine-laying and in 1939 his operations were not too alarmingly successful: 114 merchantmen sunk, but at a cost of nine U-boats. (U-boats also sank the aircraft carrier Courageous in September and the battleship Royal Oak in Scapa Flow in October.) In 1940, however, the U-boat fleet, reinforced by a production drive, began to score abundantly. One convoy lost thirty-two ships in an attack which continued through four consecutive nights, and Hitler’s new conquests gave him bases in Norway for U-boats and armed merchant raiders, bases for E-boats along the entire length of the English Channel, and bases for long-range aircraft – the F.W. 200 or Condor – which flew from Bordeaux over wide spaces of the western Atlantic and landed at Trondhjem in Norway, flying back the next day. Great Britain occupied the Faroes and Iceland when Denmark was overrun, but losses in this year mounted at an intolerable rate and Doenitz lost only twenty-two of his rapidly growing force.
Churchill turned to Roosevelt. A week after the British declaration of war in 1939 Churchill had begun, as First Lord of the Admiralty, an intimate correspondence with the President. He continued it when he became Prime Minister. The two men developed a very special relationship which was of incalculable benefit to Great Britain. This personal partnership, and its post-war institutionalization in the continuing Anglo-American alliance, appear so solid a part of the international scene that they have come to be regarded as a natural by-product of a common language and common traditions. In fact, however, Anglo-American relations were bad throughout the twenties and despite an improvement at the time of the London Conference in 1930 politicians on both sides continued to refer to each other privately in scathing, sometimes almost scurrilous, terms. There was neither trust nor liking between them. Their two countries were in the process of exchanging roles, particularly on the high seas where Great Britain’s cherished naval supremacy was passing away, and against this background politicians sparred with conscious and unconscious jealousy. In constructing their alliance Churchill and Roosevelt had to work with a mixed legacy.
One of the first fruits of their special relationship was the destroyerbases deal of September 1940 which placed in British hands fifty extra ships with which to prosecute the war against the U-boats. (A few weeks earlier Roosevelt, by the Ogdensburg agreement, had established a Joint Defence Board with belligerent Canada.) At this time Churchill was at least as worried about the war at sea as he was elated by victory in the Battle of Britain. Roosevelt, after lengthy study and intricate legal argument, agreed to transfer these fifty old but serviceable American destroyers to Great Britain in return for a promise never to surrender the British fleet and for the lease to the United States for ninety-nine years of six bases in the western Atlantic. (Two other bases were accepted as a gift. Churchill had wanted the two deals to be wholly distinct gifts but Roosevelt’s advisers, already in difficulties about deciding whether the President could effect the exchange without recourse to Congress, insisted that there must be a substantial, related quid pro quo.) But by the end of 1940 British shipping losses were running at the rate of 300,000 tons a month and were destined to rise in February, March and April 1941 to 400,000, 500,000 and 600,000 tons. Great Britain was running out of cash too. The timing of American aid had become vital.
Roosevelt’s policy was to aid Great Britain by all means short of war. So much was clear. What was unclear was how and how quickly aid could be made available and, more distantly, whether aid short of war was going to be enough. Soon after his re-election Roosevelt received an urgent plea from Churchill. In reply he moved to depart from all semblance of neutrality in order to ensure that Great Britain should receive the tools it needed to survive. The device was Lend-Lease. He told the American people that if a neighbour’s house was on fire it was only common sense and self-protection to lend him a hosepipe. The necessary Bill, which the President always referred to as the Aid to Democracies Bill, was introduced early in January 1941 and signed by the President on 11 March. Thereafter Great Britain placed orders for American materials with the American government which purchased what was required from American firms and paid them. The materials were then lent or leased to the British in return for a promise of payment after the war: the United States agreed to accept post-dated cheques in lieu of cash when there was no cash left.
Lend-Lease was a gesture of very great moral significance. It buoyed Great Britain up by promising to bring nearer the day when it would no longer be fighting virtually alone. Churchill wanted American belligerence even more than he wanted American aid, and to him, as to most people in Great Britain, financial aid was the prelude to co-belligerence, not an alternative. The material benefits of Lend-Lease were at first limited. Until some months after Pearl Harbor and Hitler had forced the United States into war on two fronts American industry was largely on a peacetime basis, the main exception being the Liberty ship programme which launched its first ship in September 1941; Great Britain’s own war production was greater than that of the United States. During 1941 Great Britain got little more from the United States than it had imported in 1940 and continued to pay cash for most of it. But what did come was important: for example, in 1941 a million tons of food (a fifteenth of British imports of food) and enough fuel oil to raise stocks from a danger point of 4.5 million tons to 7 million tons, which was maximum storage capacity.
The Lend-Lease Act was followed a few months later by an equally significant act, drawing the United States closer to war. When Hitler attacked the USSR, Roosevelt, following Churchill, promised aid to Stalin. The attack was no surprise to Roosevelt and his advisers who had known from secret sources from early in 1941 that Hitler had signed his first directive for the campaign. Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, had been doing their best to keep on reasonably good terms with the USSR, but the anti-Soviet voices in the United States were much more numerous than the anti-British ones had been. Anti-communism was a powerful emotion, especially among Roman Catholics. Stalin’s seizure of half Poland, his war on Finland and his annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania caused bitter anger, which was not confined to the émigré communities from these countries. The time would come when admiration for Russian resistance to Hitler, especially during the battles for Stalingrad, would raise a tide of pro-Russian feeling, while at other levels and later in the war Churchill was to be criticized for being too anti-Russian, but American sympathy for the Russians never sufficed to efface underlying emotions of an opposite order and even at the fearful juncture of Stalingrad’s agony – when Americans watched with genuinely bated breath and, perhaps, with less mixed emotions about the Russians than for many years before or after – there was (as too in the Battle of Britain) no plan to do anything to save the city if the last hour should strike. Roosevelt’s promise of aid in 1941, therefore, was an act of leadership from which another President, heeding the cross-currents within his country, might have refrained.
Whatever the value of this act in time to come, when it was translated into $11.3 billions’ worth of supplies, the immediate effect was slight and could not be otherwise. Even in relation to Great Britain Roosevelt was still treading warily. The Lend-Lease Act itself underlined the peculiar posture of the United States by once more expressly prohibiting the entry of American vessels into combat areas and the use of the US navy for convoy duties. But less than four weeks later the sinking in a single night of ten ships in a British convoy of twenty-one showed that further steps were necessary if the United States set more store by the defeat of Hitler than keeping out of a shooting war. Roosevelt ordered the occupation of Greenland and contemplated occupying the Azores. A force of three battleships with an aircraft carrier, cruisers and destroyers was transferred in May from the Pacific to the Atlantic. In the same month Roosevelt declared an unlimited national emergency. American shipyards were opened to British ships in need of repair. American ocean patrols were extended, shadowed Axis vessels and reported their positions to British units every few hours. A number of coastal cutters were transferred to the British flag. Roosevelt adopted and popularized a phrase of Jean Monnet dubbing the United States ‘the arsenal of democracy’. But the United States remained officially non-belligerent and even the sinking of the Robin Moor by the Germans provoked no declaration of war.
In May the British scored a ringing success at sea. Raeder, who had more faith in capital ships than Doenitz and was continuously frustrated by Hitler’s refusal to allow the indiscriminate use of submarines, renewed his surface challenge. Attempts to do this in 1940 had proved abortive, but in 1941 two new ships, the battleship Bismarck and the cruiser Prinz Eugen, were ready. Raeder planned a great offensive with them in conjunction with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which had been at Brest since March. But these two battle cruisers had suffered damage and had not recovered by the time that Bismarck and Prinz Eugen were ready to sail from Gdynia on 18 May: they never sailed the high seas again.
Bismarck was sighted by a Swedish ship soon after she left her German berth, and London was quickly informed. From Bergen she proceeded with Prinz Eugen north-westward, passing north of Iceland and thence into the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. Emerging from the Strait into the Atlantic the two ships were spotted and shadowed. Battle was joined west of Iceland soon after dawn on 24 May by the battleship Prince of Wales, also newly commissioned, and the twenty-year-old battle-cruiser Hood. Hood was sunk within minutes by a shell which pierced her decks, and all but three of her complement of 1,419 died. Half an hour later Prince of Wales, also hit, was forced to break away, but the aircraft carrier Victorious came up and delivered a first attack before the end of the day. Bismarck managed to shake off her pursuers, turned for Brest, but then incomprehensibly gave away her position by breaking wireless silence with a long message to the German Admiralty. Even then she might have escaped – as her instructions required her to do – for the bearings obtained by shore stations from her intercepted wireless transmission were wrongly interpreted when relayed to Admiral Sir Francis Tovey’s flagship King George V which led the chase in the wrong direction. The British Admiralty, however, correctly divined Bismarck’s intentions and early on the 26th an aircraft of R A F Coastal Command sighted her. A separate naval force which included the aircraft carrier Ark Royal intercepted her and Ark Royal’s aircraft, having first attacked but missed one of their own attendant cruisers, so wounded Bismarck that she became a sitting target for the British ships converging on her from all quarters. Encircled and doomed, she was sunk by torpedoes early in the morning of the 27th. One hundred and fifteen of her complement of about 2,400 were saved.
This German challenge on the surface was never to be renewed (although – with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau only damaged and Tirpitz about to come into service – the British Admiralty could not know this) and the Battle of the Atlantic was once more left to Doenitz, who built up his U-boat force to 120 during 1941 and was contriving to keep as many as half of them at sea at once. Although the pressure from the U-boats was relaxed when half of them were diverted to the Mediterranean at the end of the year, the newer boats were operating at longer ranges and the Atlantic crossing was as hazardous as ever. On the other side Roosevelt took yet further measures. The second half of 1941 was the period in which the Russians were now fighting but the Americans were not. In July Roosevelt nevertheless sent US marines to Iceland to join the British troops who had been stationed there since May 1940. This extension of American arms entailed supply and escort duties by the US navy in an operational zone. In August British and allied shipping was allowed to join American convoys and sail in them. American vessels of war were, without the knowledge of the public or the Congress, fighting an undeclared war farther and farther away from the shores of the American continent. Inevitably the German navy was in fact retaliating, although Hitler kept up the appearance and even the substance of restraint. He authorized in July attacks on American merchantmen but only in a restricted zone in the eastern Atlantic and not on the approach routes to Iceland.
In August, at Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, Roosevelt and Churchill held their first wartime meeting. It had been planned as early as January when Roosevelt’s unconventional personal emissary, Harry Hopkins, paid his first wartime visit to London. Attended as it was by the Chiefs of Staff of both countries, the Placentia Bay conference looked like a joint council of war and many on the British side hoped that it was the curtain-raiser for an American declaration of war. Stalin too wanted such a declaration and had made his wishes and his plight clear to Hopkins in Moscow a week earlier. But Roosevelt was not yet ready to take that plunge, perhaps not convinced that he would have to, and the conference’s main product was the Atlantic Charter, which many of the British participants regarded as a gust of high-sounding irrelevance. But the Atlantic Charter was more important than that. If the Americans were to go to war they must know why and wherefore, and the Charter set out war aims which would be worth fighting for. Merely contemplating war aims is a step towards war, while in the absence of war aims a democratic leader can hardly ask a people not under attack to start fighting. The Atlantic Charter was a part of the preparation of the American people for war, even though it turned out not to be strictly necessary since the issue of war or peace was decided by Hitler’s act and not by the choice of Americans. The Placentia Bay conference was also a prelude to war in another sense, for after it the President ordered an inquiry into what the United States would require if war should come – a pre-war war plan. And thirdly, the conference inaugurated the personal acquaintance between service chiefs which was to grow much closer and be formalized by the creation of the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee.
At sea the war continued to suck at the American resolve to avoid it. In September, following an astutely publicized encounter between a U-boat and the USS Greer – an inconclusive engagement described by Roosevelt as an attack on an American vessel – the President announced that the United States would protect non-American as well as American shipping in the Atlantic security zone and would fire at sight on all German and Italian warships seen there. Incidents multiplied. American opinion was growing more anti-German than anti-war. In October and November 1941 the neutrality legislation was being progressively eroded by Congress. American merchantmen were armed and the President was empowered to send American ships into British ports. The United States was virtually making war in defiance of the rules. But it showed no sign of actually declaring war: undeclared war was serving the dual purpose of helping the democracies and keeping the bulk of Americans out of the firing line (those who wanted to go and fight were tacitly allowed to join the British or Canadian forces). When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor the President only asked Congress to declare war on Japan. Then, four days later, Germany declared war on the United States.
This act by Hitler has been described as one of gratuitous folly. It is certain that, by adding the United States to his overt enemies at a time when Germany was fighting both the British Empire and the USSR, Hitler sealed his doom. But the die was cast before December 1941. By the time Hitler declared war the United States was already an active ally of the British and the Russians. Up to the middle of 1941 Hitler had every reason to keep the United States out of the war at almost any cost and he did, as we shall see, set himself firmly not only to avoid provoking Roosevelt but also to ignore Roosevelt’s provocations of him. After the turn of the year, however, the situation changed. With the launching of Barbarossa, Hitler was involved in the dreaded war on two fronts, while the United States was, though neutral in name, already decreasingly so in substance. Hitler therefore embarked on the policy of goading the Japanese into war partly in order to distract the Americans from Europe and the Atlantic and partly also because, obsessed with the British, whose survival forced him to fight the USSR with half a hand tied behind his back, he wanted Japan to deal Great Britain a knock-out blow in Singapore and India. In pursuance of this complicated aim he was forced, in November 1941, to promise Japan that Germany would declare war on the United States if Japan did. This policy failed because the Japanese blows at Pearl Harbor and Singapore were not knockouts and because of the unforeseen capacity of the Americans to fight, uniquely, a war in every quarter of the world.
Hitler badly misjudged the Americans, partly because of his preconceptions and partly because he was badly served. He entertained fantastically wrong notions of American society and politics. He believed that the masses of decent Americans (whose ancestors, he incorrectly recalled, had failed by only one congressional vote to adopt German as their national language) were on the verge of revolt against a dominant Jewish ruling class and that the United States, so far from being a bastion of democracy, was a corrupt and demoralized country fit and eager for the reception of Nazi ideas. To Hitler, Roosevelt, especially in his 1940 election campaign, was a desperate trickster clutching at any opportunity to win votes and retain power in defiance of a groundswell of popular enlightenment. On this view the United States was not nearly such a formidable enemy as its material power might make it appear. Besides being blinded by his prejudices Hitler was misled by exceptionally inept reporting by his emissaries in Washington, especially his service attachés who, pandering to these prejudices, devoted more ink to political nonsense than to technical reports. He overrated and misjudged the pro-Nazi German-American Bund; failed to appreciate the distaste of Americans for his racialism; overestimated the addiction of Americans to a comfortable neutrality; and mistook the prominence of men like Colonels Charles Lindbergh and Robert R. MacCormick, Senators Burton K. Wheeler and Gerald P. Nye and the ‘radio priest’ Father Charles E. Coughlin for real political influence.
He was also, and more pardonably, misled by the American record in the thirties. The economic crisis and isolationism prevented the United States from playing an effective role in world affairs in that decade. Hitler understood this, but he did not understand how far war would change American attitudes and policies. When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 (partly to forestall a possible Russian move which could precipitate a new Russo-Japanese war) the Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, had toyed with the idea of intervention. He was well aware of the force of isolationism in the United States but he hoped that by a show of determination he might influence the political balance in Tokyo where a civilian cabinet was at odds with the army factions which had provoked the fighting in Manchuria. This cabinet had no desire to begin a war with China in order to stave off a war with the USSR, but it fell. Stimson thereupon proposed economic sanctions against Japan but President Herbert Hoover did not like the idea (nor did the British government). Stimson pressed his interventionist policy again a few months later when Japanese troops were landed at Shanghai, but the President remained opposed to it and Stimson knew that American opinion would not tolerate it: he was using the prospect of sanctions as a counter, but in the knowledge that he could not play it. In the Ethiopian crisis Stimson’s successor, Cordell Hull, instituted voluntary sanctions against Italy but there was little cooperation between the United States and the leading members of the League and Hull’s initiative merely associated the United States with a failure. The remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Spanish civil war, the conclusion of the Axis and Anti-Comintern Pacts, the extension of the war in the east to China itself in the summer of 1937, the sinking of the American gunboat Panay and three tankers on the Yangtse in December all reinforced the American desire to keep clear of wars; and were seen to. Moreover, Roosevelt’s unhappy attempts to intervene diplomatically in European politics in the late thirties, revealing his own hesitations and the hiatus between the American and British governments, roused only Hitler’s scorn, and his attempts to avert war at the last moment were brushed off by Hitler. The war was going to be short. Either Great Britain and France would do nothing to help Poland or they would intervene and be quickly subdued. On this basis there was no American problem. But the basis was wrong. The war was not short and the Americans soon began to take a menacing hand in it.
The six months which embraced Hitler’s invasion of the USSR and his declaration of war against the United States marked also the destruction, by his own acts, of his power of initiative in world affairs. The failure of Barbarossa was crucial, for had he defeated the USSR before the end of the year he would have been supreme in the European continent and either he would have issued no declaration of war against the United States or he could have done so without involving himself in the pincer movement which finally crushed him. It was the burden of Barbarossa which led him from a European to a world strategy, from a league in which he could certainly play and possibly win to a league in which he must lose.
But, secondly, the survival of Great Britain was also crucial because, without it, it is unlikely that the United States would have joined the war as an ally of the USSR against Germany.
Hitler’s failures in Barbarossa and the Battle of Britain were both narrow ones. Something has already been said about both these engagements and more will be said later in this book about the sources of Russian endurance and victory. If Hitler had lived (as Napoleon did) to ponder his mistakes and failures in tranquillity, he would no doubt have fought the battles of the autumn of 1940 and the autumn of 1941 over and over again. He might also have puzzled no less over the incomprehensibility of the Americans and the British, who behaved in these critical years 1939–41 with what, to an outsider, could only seem perverse inconsequence. If Hitler made mistakes about the Anglo-Saxon peoples, whom in some moods he judged to be not much inferior to the German, he could claim that he was to some degree misled by their illogicality as well as by his own preconceptions and advisers.
He could hark back to the British declaration of war at the very beginning. This declaration, which was a formal consequence of the German attack on Poland two days earlier, had no discernible practical results at the time. If it was anything more than an empty formality it implied a determination to attack Germany. But neither Great Britain nor France had forces or plans for doing so, nor did they do so. (The only plans extant were for air operations in response to full-scale German action in the west.) In the event it was Hitler who attacked them and not the other way round. Seven months later he defeated France and prepared to defeat Great Britain. His plans posed a threat to American security which the Americans could, by the use of naval and air forces, have helped to defeat. Yet they too declined, as the British had declined in 1939, to take any direct action, and if they abstained at this critical point they might be counted most unlikely to intervene in a European war at any other. On this premise Hitler’s own declaration of war at the end of 1941 was a formal act without practical consequences like the British declaration in 1939; the practical consequences, if any, would be in the Pacific where the Americans were already embroiled with the Japanese. But the Americans, who had abstained from direct action in the face of the threat in 1940, were ready by 1941 to throw themselves into the European war and even give it priority over a Pacific war. The intervention which had seemed politically impossible in 1940 became automatic in 1941. To Hitler it might have appeared that the British and Americans had leaders who did not understand power. The British had ostensibly engaged themselves in 1939 to do something which they had not the power to do; the Americans in 1940 had the power to intervene in a situation of critical importance to themselves but abstained from doing so. But in this assessment of the seeming political ineptitude of his adversaries Hitler failed to take account of Aristotle’s diagnosis of the nature of the commercial state, slow to action but rich in the capacity to procrastinate and then triumph – not to mention Bernard Shaw’s analysis of the Englishman’s genius for triumphing through an insensitivity to the dangers of his own position amounting to a kind of sublime arrogance.
Hitler had for years intended to make war on the USSR but he never wanted a war against either Great Britain or the United States. These wars he merely accepted when they came. He tried to come to terms with Great Britain and then to defeat it, and when both these efforts failed he turned away. He tried for a time to avoid war with the United States. On the outbreak of war in 1939 he forbade attacks on passenger ships, and when the Athenia was sunk with its twenty-eight American passengers he had the crew of U-30 sworn to secrecy on their return to port and tried to persuade the world that the sinking was a British stunt to drag the United States into war. In October he permitted attacks on enemy merchant ships without warning and on enemy passenger ships after warning (the need for this warning was lifted at the beginning of November), but he still refused to sanction attacks on neutrals. He allowed the City of Flint, which had been captured, taken to Norway and there released by the Norwegians (who interned the German boarders), to proceed without further molestation and he kept to this reticent policy despite the insistent pleas of his naval advisers. If Roosevelt’s only concern had been to avoid incidents in the Atlantic he would have had no great problem, for Hitler wanted to avoid such incidents too. As late as the summer of 1941 Hitler was still turning a deaf ear to Raeder’s pleas to sanction indiscriminate retaliation in the undeclared war which the Americans were waging in the Atlantic.
Thus Hitler had pursued in the Atlantic a policy of avoiding conflict with the United States up to the last months before he declared war. But in the Pacific, where he operated at second remove through his Japanese allies, he had the choice between restraining Japan in order to prolong American non-belligerency and, alternatively, egging Japan on. He chose the latter course. Engaged in a war on two fronts in which the Americans were becoming unofficially or even formally involved, he wanted to create a second front for the Americans too. Japan could open this front and at the same time attack the British Empire which had so sadly failed to respond to Hitler’s offer of an honourable place in a world partitioned on Hitlerian lines. Hitler knew from his agents that Japan had decided not to attack the USSR and, by relaying to Tokyo his own version of Great Britain’s helpless plight and his contemptuous estimate of American valour, he encouraged the more bellicose members of the Japanese cabinet. Discussions in Washington between the Americans and the Japanese during the autumn puzzled and worried Ribbentrop and his Ambassador in Tokyo, who could not make out whether they represented a genuine attempt to avoid war. Even after the fall of the comparatively moderate Konoye cabinet and the appointment of General Tojo as Prime Minister on 18 October the Germans were afraid that the Japanese might fail them, and so in November Ribbentrop went so far as to promise to help Japan in a war against the United States and not to make a separate peace. On 11 December Hitler fulfilled this promise. Italy declared war too.
After 1941 Hitler started no more wars. He gradually lost those he had started.
Every war plan has two main elements: the instruments with which to wage it and the right time to begin it. On both counts Hitler’s war on the USSR was not merely a conspicuous failure but also mismanaged and mistaken. Although his armies came within an ace of capturing Moscow and so perhaps of victory, they were inadequately equipped to pursue it after the first six months and 1941 was the wrong date, since Hitler, on his own statement of 1937 which there is no reason to disbelieve, intended to win Lebensraum in the east in 1943–5. It was furthermore no part of any plan of his to make war on the USSR when engaged in other wars elsewhere. In attacking Czechoslovakia and Poland, Hitler gambled on getting what he wanted without war. In the first case the gamble came off but in the second it failed and produced war not only with Poland but a war in the west which he could neither win nor conclude. By 1941, elated perhaps by his continental successes in the west, he gambled again by advancing the date for his war in the east and by discounting the significance of continuing British belligerence. By the end of that year his most serious purpose – the winning of Lebensraum – was in jeopardy; and his declaration of war on the United States further exposed his maladroitness, for it converted Great Britain from a relatively minor offshore enemy into an assembly area for the legions of a vastly more dangerous foe.
In retrospect it is clear that Hitler could no longer win the war after this date. But Germany was not yet doomed to the unconditional surrender which the allies were to exact, for the German U-boats might starve Great Britain of food and arms and prevent American armies from crossing the ocean, and German V weapons might force the western allies, if not to surrender, at least to negotiate a separate peace in the west.