Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

It must always be remembered that these impressive figures were reached almost two years after the attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941, and that for two years after the fall of France the United States faced a critical diplomatic crisis with almost no military resources to fall back on or to meet the piteous appeals for aid which came from Britain, China, Greece, Turkey, Sweden, and dozens of other countries. Except for Britain, most of these appeals received little satisfaction. China, for example, received only 48 planes in the first eight months of 1940 and only $9 million worth of all kinds of arms and munitions in the whole year 1940. Of the 2,251 combat planes produced in the United States from July 7, 1940, to February 1, 1941, 1,512 went to Britain and 607 went to our own army and navy.

Boxed in between the steady advance of authoritarian aggression, the inadequacy of American war production, the appeals of the aggressors’ potential victims, and the outraged howls of American isolationists, the Roosevelt Administration improvised a policy which consisted, in almost equal measure, of propagandist public statements, tactical subterfuges, and hesitant half-steps. In September 1940, in spite of the adverse effect it might have on Roosevelt’s chances in the November election, the Administration persuaded the Congress to enact a Selective Service Act to build up the manpower of the armed forces through compulsion. It provided for one year of training for 900,000 men, and stipulated that they must not be used outside the Western Hemisphere.

In the same month, September 1940, Roosevelt proclaimed a limited National Emergency and, by executive fiat, gave fifty old destroyers of World War I to Britain in return for ninety-nine-year leases of naval and air bases in British possessions in this hemisphere from Newfoundland to Trinidad.

The opening of a new session of Congress in January 1941 gave Roosevelt an opportunity to state the aims of America’s foreign policy. He did so in the famous “Four Freedoms” speech: America was looking forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of every person to worship God in his own way, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. In casting about for some way in which America could contribute to these ends while still remaining out of the war, and without enraging the isolationists completely, the Roosevelt Administration, in the early months of 1941, came up with a number of procedures which they summed up in the phrases “America as the Arsenal of Democracy” and “Lend-Lease.”

The Arsenal of Democracy idea meant that America would do all it could to supply armaments and essential supplies to countries resisting aggressors, especially to Britain. The British side of this idea was reflected in a public statement of Winston Churchill’s: “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job.” These statements are of historical significance because, even as they were being made, the military experts in both America and Britain were trying to persuade the political leaders that material contributions from the United States to Britain, no matter how large, would not be sufficient: American fighting men would also be needed.

The Arsenal of Democracy project, even if not adequate to defeat Hitler by itself, faced the tremendous obstacles of Britain’s inability to pay and Britain’s inability to ensure that war materials from the United States could be delivered in England. These two problems occupied much of Roosevelt’s attention in 1941, the one in the months January to March and the other in the months March to December.

At the outbreak of war in September 1939, Britain had about $4,500,000,000 in assets which could be converted readily into dollars to buy supplies in the United States (gold, dollar exchange, or American securities). In the first sixteen months of the war, Britain earned another $2,000,000,000 of dollars from sales of gold or of those goods, like Scotch whiskey or English woolens, which America was willing to buy. But in that sixteen months, Britain paid out nearly $4,500,000,000 for American goods and placed orders for about $2,500,000,000 more, so that the year 1941 opened with Britain’s uncommitted dollar reserves down to about $500,000,000. In the first few months of that year 1941, Britain was selling United States securities (which had been taken over from British subjects) at a rate of $10,000,000 a week. It was clear that Britain’s ability to pay in dollars for urgently needed supplies was reaching the end. This end could not be postponed by means of loans, since they were forbidden by the Neutrality Acts and the Johnson Act. Moreover, the experience of the First World War had shown that loans left a most unhappy postwar legacy.

To Roosevelt’s realistic mind it seemed foolish to allow monetary considerations to stand as an obstacle in the way of self-defense (as he regarded the survival of Britain). Rather, he felt that the resources of war should be pooled between the United States and Britain so that each could use what it needed from a common store. He emphasized that Englishmen were already dying in our defense and that the British had already given us hundreds of millions of dollars to build factories and machines to manufacture planes, engines, ships, or tanks; they were also giving us, without cost, vital secrets in radar and submarine detection, our first successful liquid-cooled airplane engine (the Rolls-Royce “Merlin,” built by Packard in a factory constructed with British money and used in our best escort fighter plane, the P-51 Mustang), many secret features incorporated in the engines of our B-24 (Liberator) bombers, and the Whittle jet engine (which was later adapted to produce the General Electric Company’s jet engine used in the P-80 Shooting Star).

As early as December 17, 1940, Roosevelt expressed his point of view to the American people in the following characteristic statement: “Suppose my neighbor’s house catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him put out the fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbor, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it.’ What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15—1 want my garden hose back after the fire is over. ...” A bill embodying these ideas was introduced in the Congress on January 10, 1941 as H.R. 1776, and became law two months later as the Lend-Lease Act.

During these two months, debate raged both on Capitol Hill and throughout the nation, with the isolationists using every possible argument against it. Senator Burton K. Wheeler, who had been vice-presidential nominee on a third-party ticket in 1924 and had become increasingly isolationist and reactionary with the passing years, said that the bill would “plow under every fourth American boy.” Other opponents argued that Britain had tens of billions in concealed dollar assets and that Lend-Lease was merely a clever trick for foisting the costs of Britain’s war onto the backs of American taxpayers. Still others insisted that Lend-Lease was an unneutral act which would arouse German rage and eventually involve the American people in a war they had no need to get in. The bill finally passed by a largely party-line vote; in the House of Representatives this vote was 260-161, with only 25 Democrats voting against it and only 24 Republicans voting for it. It provided that the President could “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of . . . any defense article” to any nation whose defense he found vital to the defense of the United States; the payment could be made to the United States by any “payment or repayment in kind or property or any other direct or indirect benefit which the President deems satisfactory.” By November 1941, $14.3 billion had been provided for carrying out these provisions.