NEUTRALITY AS A WEAPON

THE U.S.A. TAKES A HAND

Although by spring 1941, as the Blitz in London passed its peak, the USA was still neutral, President Roosevelt's administration, usually but not always with the consent of Congress, was taking an increasingly active role in Britain's lone struggle to resist the onslaught of Nazism in Europe. His doing so was, in traditionally neutral America, something of a political hot potato. To understand the events of the time, it is necessary to look back a little at the nature of America's view of European conflict.

The involvement of the United States in the First World War had been a major psychological trauma for a nation reared and developed on the concept of isolationism. Then, far more than now, the United States was a nation of immigrants, still retaining close nationalistic ties with their homelands. When the Great War began in 1914, and throughout 1915, thousands of Americans left their now-native shores to return to Europe and fight for the Kaiser. Nonetheless, the nation as a whole wished wholeheartedly to remain neutral; to keep clear of a conflict that could benefit them nothing, but damage them greatly. Despite this wish, Americans could not restrain their anger at the reports of German brutality in Belgium and France which repeatedly reached the press in the USA, probably with assistance from (and exaggeration by) the Allied propaganda machine.

Despite clear preference for the British and French cause expressed almost daily by some, though not all, members of the US administration, and in American newspapers, the US government, for reasons that are now not easy to understand, expected Germany to honour American unilaterally declared neutrality. The Wilson administration was incensed when Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare, and its anger made it inevitable that the USA would enter the war, despite Woodrow Wilson's avowed intention to keep his country out of it.

After the Great War, public opinion in the USA could not forget that the US involvement in the conflict had been the result of political mismanagement (from the isolationist standpoint). There was great pressure on Congress progressively to define in far greater detail than hitherto the nature of US neutrality. In 1935, Congress enacted a law which authorised the President to prevent the shipment of arms and prohibit US citizens from travelling on foreign ships, except at their own risk. As the European political situation drifted towards war, and the US became nervous of the alliance between Japan and Germany, a Neutrality Act of November 1939 repealed the arms embargo element of the earlier legislation and instituted what became known as the "cash and carry" arms system, designed to help friendly nations who were attacked by the tyrannies of Europe while keeping American out of the battle.

The USA was now beginning to show signs of the same philosophy that had caused the problems in 1916: the wish to help one side in a war while remaining neutral. Despite protests from midwestern isolationists and right wing senators, America began to sell arms to Britain and France. By so doing, Roosevelt made American neutrality wholly dependent upon the Axis powers' acceptance of the principle that a neutral power had the right to sell arms to Axis enemies. Clearly, it was a position that was tenable only for as long as Hitler and his Axis allies wished it to be.

By the time Nazi Germany had taken Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France, Roosevelt was advising the American nation to "have done with fears and illusion". In the year following the May 1940 German invasion of North West Europe, Congress appropriated $37,000,000,000, more than the total US expenditure on the Great War, for rearmament and aid to the Allies.

Public opinion in the USA was sharply divided. On the one hand William Allen White's Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies urged that the USA should become Britain's non-belligerent ally. On the other, the America First Committee, whose policy was one of pacifism, isolationism, anti-Semitism and dislike of almost anything British gained the strong support of many public figures, including Charles A. Lindbergh. Because Germany and Russia were signatories to a Non-aggression Pact, following the August 1939 agreement, pro-Nazis and pro-Communists joined in an unlikely alliance to keep the USA out of the war.

On June 10th 1940, Roosevelt, in a famous speech at Charlottesville, Virginia, warned the US people that they could not risk becoming "a lone island in a world dominated by the philosophy of force", and promised to "extend to the opponents of force the material resources of this nation". At the end of July, by the Act of Havana, the USA announced its protection of Latin America, and thereby prevented Germany from taking control of French and Dutch colonies. Then in September, as America reeled with shock at Britain's struggle in the Battle of Britain, Roosevelt declared a State of Emergency on September 8th, instituted the draft and called up 800,000 men.

In August, after some delay and somewhat contentious negotiation (see next chapter), the USA had provided Britain with 50 desperately needed destroyers, all but three of which were of First World War vintage. Roosevelt had called this "an epochal and far-reaching" act of preparation for continental defence in the face of danger, because he had been able to justify the action politically by securing in exchange 99-year leases on seven British bases from Guiana to Newfoundland.

Now the country prepared openly for war, retooling the factories and retraining the workers for the production of munitions. An Office of Production was established to co-ordinate defence output and do everything possible to expedite aid to Britain ("short of war"). The USA had now become what Roosevelt was to call at the end of the year "The Arsenal of Democracy', and the Presidential election of November 1940 was fought against the background of the world crisis, with Roosevelt running for a third term on the grounds that the crisis demanded it. His campaign platform remained one of support for Britain but non-participation in foreign conflicts. Elected once more to the Presidency, Roosevelt found himself leading a country whose mood was changing fast. Americans had grown to admire Britain's desperate stand; to detest the tyranny of the jackboot.Sensing that the time was right to extend more help to Britain, Roosevelt proposed in January 1941 the Lend-Lease programme.

Lend-Lease came as a replacement for the "cash-and-carry" arms policy just in time for Britain, whose reserves of gold, dollars and US investment were almost exhausted by the cost of the war. When the bill, with the curiously patriotic designation HR-1776, became law in March, Roosevelt had been given the greatest discretionary authority ever given to an American President. An initial appropriation of $7,000,000,000 was authorised by Congress, and arms, ships, and aircraft began to cross the Atlantic with the least possible red tape and official hold-up. RAF pilots were sent to the USA to train. American warships began convoy escort duties, and inevitably became involved in actions against U-Boats. As a neutral nation, America now lacked a certain credibility. As an ally in the battle against Nazism, she was a prize without price.

Meanwhile, the USA had become increasingly the principal obstacle to Japan's expansionist aims. All through the Thirties, as Japan first invaded Manchuria, then attacked China, then became Hitler's ally, the relationship between the USA and Japan had become progressively more strained. In the summer of 1940, as support for Britain's war effort was stepped up, sales of strategic materials to Japan were banned. On September 27th 1940, Japan joined Italy and Germany in a tripartite pact that required each to come to the others' aid should the USA enter the war, and, the following April, Japan signed a Neutrality Pact with Russia, who was, it should be remembered, still a party to a non-aggression pact with Germany.

The tightening stranglehold on trade with Japan, and the increasingly evident readiness to fight displayed by the USA, put pressure on Japan to expand and find new resources by colonial acquisition. On July 2nd 1941, 50,000 Japanese troops occupied Indo-China, until then administered by the Vichy French government; Britain and the USA froze all Japanese investment assets, and the slide towards war in the Asian theatre had begun. In July of 1941, as German armies fought their way across Russia, President Roosevelt's envoy Harry Hopkins flew to Britain to see Churchill, and flew in a PBY Catalina to Moscow. He took to Stalin a letter from Roosevelt offering assistance to Russia "in its magnificent resistance to the treacherous aggression by Hitlerite Germany". This resulted in a protocol signed on October 1st by Averell Harriman, US lease-lend representative, Britain's Lord Beaverbrook and the Russian Foreign Minister Molotov, by which it was agreed that a huge volume of supplies would be sent to Russia.

Meanwhile, on August 9th-12th, Roosevelt had conferred with Churchill at Argentia Bay, Newfoundland, exchanging visits aboard their warships Prince of Wales and Augusta . This conference produced a remarkable document that will be a part of history for centuries to come - the Atlantic Charter. Essentially a statement of the principles for which the war was being fought, and of the shape of the world that they hoped would emerge from the war, the Charter was drafted by Churchill, and amended and developed by the two statesmen together. Subsequently incorporated into a Declaration of the United Nations, the Atlantic Charter is, in its way, as historic as Magna Carta, or the American Declaration of Independence. It was also an act of true friendship between men and between nations.

Thus the USA, without declaring war, without going to war, became deeply implicated in the greatest war man had yet known. The stage was set.