Roosevelt’s Difficulty
Franklin Roosevelt’s problem was that at this great turning point in history he did not lead a warlike nation, whereas Adolf Hitler did. The American people are not cowardly. But, living in prosperous isolation, they have been the spoiled children of modern history. Spoiled children do not bear well the rigors of the field. Once they entered the war, the Americans fought with a logistic train of luxury and self-protection that to the warriors of Germany, the Soviet Union, and even England, was laughable. Nevertheless they had the riches and the will for this. The strong can fight any kind of fight they please.
The Americans have a tradition of militia-like fighting. Presented with a threat, they drop their pleasures, take up arms, and fight amateurishly but bravely to get the thing over with. They formed this pattern in their revolution, and confirmed it in their civil war and the First World War. Roosevelt understood this. He had to hold Germany at bay until he could present the chance for world conquest to his people in the guise of a threat to their safety. This, with a masterly exhibition of patient, spider-like waiting, he did. Meantime, he robbed Germany of two certain victories—over Great Britain and over the Soviet Union—by an inspired instrument of indirect war-making, a genuine new thing in military history, the so-called Lend-Lease Act.
A Cunning Trick
By the end of 1940, despite her narrow escapes at Dunkirk and in the air battle, Britain was sinking to her knees. She had only one recourse left on the planet to save her: the United States. But the Neutrality Act threatened to cut the English off from the American farms and factories that were keeping them alive. They were running out of dollars to pay even for grain and oil, let alone the ships, planes, guns, and bullets which they could no longer manufacture for themselves in the necessary quantities. For they lacked labor, materials, and plant, and they kept falling further behind under air attack.
The Neutrality Act forced belligerents to pay dollars for United States goods, and to come and fetch them. The Act posed more of a dilemma for Roosevelt than for the British. For them, a clear wise course lay open: negotiated peace with Germany. As this writer has often pointed out, had England made such a peace the British Empire would exist today. The Soviet Union would have been crushed in a one-front war, and instead of a rampant Bolshevism we would see in Russia at worst some pacific, disarmed form of social democracy. But none of this fitted in with Roosevelt’s ideas. He had no intention of allowing Germany to gain ascendancy over the Euro-Asian heartland in a world-dominating partnership with the sea lords of Britannia.
And so, to circumvent the Neutrality Act, Franklin Roosevelt devised Lend-Lease, which was nothing more or less than a policy to give the British free of charge—and later the Russians too—all the war materials they needed to fight us! The audacity of the trick was breathtaking; the disguise was cunning. And while the record shows that Roosevelt’s clever advisers did much to push this unprecedented proposal through the stunned, balky Congress, it also clearly shows that the revolutionary idea sprang, in the phrase of Sherwood, straight from Roosevelt’s “forested mind.”
Roosevelt sold this scheme to the simpleminded, inattentive American people with a typical bit of Augustan demagoguery, the famous comparison to a garden hose. When a neighbor’s house is on fire, he said at a press conference, one does not bargain with him over the sale or renting of the garden hose he needs to put it out. One gladly lends him the hose, so as to keep the fire from one’s own house. Once the fire is out, the neighbor returns the hose; or if he has damaged it, there is time enough then to settle the account.
This was, of course, shameless and hollow poppycock. Warships, warplanes, war materials are not garden hoses. To take Roosevelt’s comparison at its face value, if your neighbor’s house is on fire, what you really do is rush over there and fight the fire with him. You do not lend him your hose, and then stand idly by watching him try to cope with the flames. That this silly stuff was swallowed whole by the Americans simply shows how uncannily shrewd Roosevelt was in managing them. During his successful 1940 election campaign for an unprecedented third term, he had declared in a famous speech, “I tell you again, and again, and again, your boys are not going to be sent into foreign wars.” He was eagerly awaiting a chance to go back on this clear pledge. Meantime he had to use tricks and guile to oppose Germany.
The Real Meaning of Lend-Lease
It was impossible for him—and this he knew—to present the case to his people in realistic terms. Otherwise he could have told them in effect, “My friends, this war is for the mastery of the world. Our aim should be to achieve that mastery ourselves, but with a minimum of blood. Let us encourage others to do our fighting for us. Let us give them all the stuff they need to keep fighting. What do we care? In developing the industries to produce this Lend-Lease stuff, we will be preparing ourselves, industrially and militarily, for world leadership. They will use up all our early models, our discardable stuff, killing Germans for us. Maybe they will do the whole job for us, but that is doubtful. We will have to step in at the end, but mopping up will be easy. We will have gained a world victory with the expenditure of a lot of hardware, which we can turn out faster, and in greater quantities, than all the world put together, without even feeling the pinch. The others will shed the blood, and we will take the rule.”
That was what Lend-Lease meant and that was how it worked.
First the British, and then the Russians, were induced by Lend-Lease to keep on with extremely bloody, almost hopeless struggles, when the easier, safer, more profitable alternative of negotiated peace always lay open to them. There is reason to think that at Stalin’s low point late in 1941, when his armies and his air force had virtually ceased to exist as coherent battle formations and we were smashing toward Moscow, that supreme realist would have proposed peace again, if not for the encouragement in words and supplies—not in lives—of the United States. As it was, the Russian people made sacrifices in blood never matched in all history, to transfer world hegemony from one Anglo-Saxon power to another.
And Franklin Roosevelt so maneuvered matters that the British had to beg for this bloodletting help! They were put in the position of being abjectly grateful for the chance to fight Roosevelt’s battles. On December 8, 1940, Churchill wrote the American President a very long letter, which deserves a bolder place in history than it now holds. Churchill once said that he had not become Prime Minister to preside over the dissolution of the Empire, but with this letter he dissolved it. Churchill in this document frankly stated that England had come to the end of her rope, in the matter of ships, planes, materials, and dollars; and he asked the President to “find ways and means” to help England in the common cause. This was what Roosevelt had been icily waiting for in his wheelchair: this written confession by the British Prime Minister that without American aid the Empire was finished. Within two weeks he had proposed Lend-Lease to his advisers, and within a month he had laid it before Congress.
Empire means rule, and sufficient armed power to enforce the rule. In Churchill’s letter, he acknowledged that his country and his Empire had become powerless to enforce their rule, and begged for succor. Roosevelt leaped to comply. Even if England was finished as an imperial power, she remained a country of forty millions with a good navy and air force, at war with Roosevelt’s archrival; a splendid island base just off the coast of Europe, moreover, from which to attack Germany in the future. The first order of business was to keep her fighting.
Bargain War-Making
Despite all the quack language in the act about lending and leasing, the transfer of American weapons and materials throughout the war was a gift. No formal accounting was even kept. The President asked, and the Congress granted him, power to send arms and war goods wherever he pleased, in whatever quantities he pleased. Certainly the Congress when they passed the law would have balked at including Bolshevist countries. But at that time the Soviet Union was supposedly Hitler’s friend. Later, when war broke out on the east
ern front, Roosevelt poured a flood of supplies to the Bolsheviks without consulting Congress. The Americans complain that the Russians have never shown proper gratitude. The attitude of the Russians is more realistic. Having spilled the blood of perhaps eleven million of their sons to help the United States to its present world position, they tend to feel that the tanks and planes were paid for.
The Yankees love a bargain. Lend-Lease was bargain war-making. For the big corporations, and for millions of workers, it merely meant a tremendous increase of prosperity. The price was painlessly postponed to the future by means of defense bonds. Others did the actual fighting and dying.
Roosevelt and his advisers did discuss the risk that Germany would take Lend-Lease as an act of war—which it certainly was—and would formally declare war on the United States. Since this was just what he wanted, he was prepared to run the risk. America would have responded with a militia-like surge. Little as Adolf Hitler understood the United States, he did understand that. He had no intention of taking on the United States until he had finished with the Soviet Union, an operation which was already in an advanced planning stage. So Germany swallowed Lend-Lease with some harsh words, and the “arsenal of democracy” tooled up to help British plutocracy and Russian Bolshevism destroy the Reich, the last bastion in Europe against the Red Slav tide.
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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:Most broad statistics of the war are approximations, and the figures on total deaths vary widely from one source to another. The low rate of eventual American losses is a fact. We planned and fought that kind of war, expending money and machines instead of human lives where possible. Roon seems to think this indicates a deficiency in American valor. We had enough valor to beat the Germans wherever we took them on. That was all the valor we needed.—V.H.
37
TRAVELLING to his new post in mid-January, Leslie Slote found himself stalled in Lisbon by a shortage of Lufthansa accommodations to Berlin. He checked into the Palace Hotel in Estoril, Lisbon’s palm-lined seaside resort, where diplomats, wealthy refugees, Gestapo, and other foreign agents congregated. He thought he might pick up some information there while he waited for an air reservation to open up. Actually, he found Estoril in January an exceedingly chilly and boring place. The Germans abounded, but they kept in aloof clusters, regarding other people with supercilious eyes.
He sat in the crowded lobby of the hotel one afternoon gnawing at his pipe, and reading in a Swiss newspaper about British successes against the Italians in Abyssinia and North Africa, faint rays in the gloom. The neutral newspaper had been hard to come by. Fascist and Nazi journals now blanketed Portuguese newsstands, with a few scrawny, disgustingly servile periodicals from Vichy France. British and American publications had vanished. It was a fair barometric reading of the way the war was going, at least in the judgment of Portugal’s rulers. A year ago, on Lisbon newsstands, papers of both sides had been equally available.
“Meestair Slote! Meestair Leslie Slote!”
He jumped up and followed the small pink-cheeked page to a telephone near the reception desk.
“Leslie? Hello, it’s Bunky. How goes it by the old seaside?”
Bunker Wendell Thurston, Jr., had attended the Foreign Service school with Slote, and now held the post of second secretary in the American legation in Lisbon.
“Mighty dull, Bunky. What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing much.” Thurston sounded amused. “It’s just that you’ve spoken to me now and then, I believe, about a girl named Natalie Jastrow.”
Slote said sharply, “Yes, I have. What about her?”
“A girl by that name is sitting across the desk from me.”
“Who is? Natalie?”
“Like to talk to her? When I told her you were here she jumped a foot.”
“Christ, yes.”
Natalie came on the phone laughing, and Slote’s heart throbbed at the familiar lovely sound. “Hello, old Slote,” she said.
“Natalie! This is so staggering, and wonderful. What are you doing here?”
“Well, how about you?” Natalie said. “I’m as surprised as you are. Why aren’t you in Moscow?”
“I got hung up, in Washington and then here. Is Aaron with you?”
“I wish he were. He’s in Siena.”
“What! Aren’t you on your way back to the States?”
Natalie took a moment to answer. “Yes and no. Leslie, as long as you’re here, can I see you for a while?”
“Naturally! Wonderful! Immediately! I’ll come in to the legation.”
“Wait, wait. You’re at the Palace Hotel, aren’t you? I’ll come out and meet you. I’d rather do that.”
Bunky Thurston came on the line. “Look, Leslie, I’ll put her on the bus. She’ll arrive in half an hour or so. If I may, I’ll join you two in the Palace lobby at five.”
She still had a fondness for big dark hats. He could see her through the dusty bus window, moving down the aisle in a jam of descending passengers. She ran to him, threw her arms around him, and kissed his cheek. “Hi! I’m freezing. I could have worn my ratty beaver coat, but who’d think it would be this cold and gray in Lisbon? Brrr! It’s even colder out here by the sea, isn’t it?” She clapped her hand to her hat as the wind flapped it. “Let’s look at you. Well! No change. If anything, you look rested.”
She said all this very fast, her eyes wide and shiny, her manner peculiarly excited. The old spell worked at once. In the months since he had last seen Natalie, Slote had started up a romance with a girl from Kansas named Nora Jamison. Nora was tall, brunette, and dark-eyed like this one, but otherwise as different as a doe from a bobcat: even-tempered, affectionate, bright enough to be in her third year as a senator’s secretary, and pretty enough to play leads with a semiprofessional Washington theatre group. Her father was a rich farmer; she drove a Buick convertible. She was altogether a find, and Slote was thinking seriously of marrying her on his return from Moscow. Nora worshipped him, and she was better looking than Natalie Jastrow and much easier to manage. But this Jewish girl in the big hat put her arm around him and brushed his face with her lips; he experienced a stabbing remembrance of what her love was like, and the snare closed on him again.
He said, “Well, you know how I admire you, but you do look slightly beat up.”
“Do I ever! I’ve had hell’s own time getting here. Let’s get out of this wind. Where’s the Palace Hotel? I’ve been to Estoril twice, but I forget.”
He said, taking her arm and starting to walk, “It isn’t far. What’s the story? Why didn’t Aaron come? What are you doing here?”
“Byron’s arriving tomorrow on a submarine.” He halted in astonishment. She looked up at him, hugged his arm, and laughed, her face alive with joy. “That’s it. That’s why I’m here.”
“He made it through that school?”
“You sound surprised.”
“I thought he might find it too much work.”
“He squeaked by. This is his first long cruise. The sub’s stopping here, just for a few days. I suppose you think I’m rattlebrained, but he wrote me to come and meet him, and here I am.”
“Nothing you do really surprises me, sweetie. I’m the man you came to visit in Warsaw in August ’39.”
Again she squeezed his arm, laughing. “So I did. Quite an excursion that turned out to be, hey! My God, it’s cold here! It’s a wonder all these palm trees don’t turn brown and die. You know, I’ve been through Lisbon twice before, Slote, and each time I’ve been utterly miserable. It feels very strange to be happy here.”
He asked her about Aaron Jastrow’s situation. Natalie said the impact of the note from the Secretary of State’s office had somehow been frittered away. The fact that Jastrow’s lapsed passport showed a questionable naturalization had fogged his case. Van Winaker, the young consul in Florence, had dawdled for almost a month, promising action and never getting around to it; then he had fallen ill and gone for a cure in France, and several more weeks had slipped b
y. Now Van Winaker was corresponding with the Department on how to deal with the matter. She had his firm promise that, one way or another, he would work it out. The worst of it was, she declared, that Aaron himself really was in no hurry to leave his villa, now that it seemed just a matter of unravelling a little more red tape. He half welcomed every new delay, though he went through the motions of being vexed. This was what was defeating her. He would not fight, would not put any pressure on the consul to settle the thing. He was writing serenely away at his Constantine book, keeping to all his little routines and rituals, drinking coffee in the lemon house, taking his walks at sunset, rising before dawn to sit blanketed on the terrace and watch the sun come up. He believed that the Battle of Britain had decided the war, that Hitler had made his bid and failed, and that a negotiated peace would soon emerge.
“I suppose I made a mistake, after all, going back to Italy,” she said, as they walked into the hotel. “With me around he’s perfectly comfortable and not inclined to budge.”
Slote said, “I think you were right to return. He’s in more danger than he realizes, and needs a hard push. Maybe you and I together can shake him free.”
“But you’re going to Moscow.”
“I have thirty days, and I’ve only used up ten. Perhaps I’ll go back to Rome with you. I know several people in that embassy.”
“That would be marvellous!” Natalie halted in the middle of the pillared lobby. “Where’s the bar?”
“It’s down at that end and it’s very dismal and beery. It’s virtually Gestapo headquarters. Why? Would you like a drink?”
“I’d just as lief have tea, Leslie.” Her manner was oddly evasive. “I haven’t eaten all day. I was just wondering where the bar was.”