by Ralph Raico
Part 1 Part 2 Part 4 Part 5 d Embroiling America in War Again
In September, 1939, Britain went to war with Germany, pursuant to the guarantee which Chamberlain had been panicked into extending to Poland in March. Lloyd George had termed the guarantee “hare-brained,” while Churchill had supported it. Nonetheless, in his history of the war Churchill wrote: “Here was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory ground which must surely lead to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.” With the war on, Winston was recalled to his old job as First Lord of the Admiralty. Then, in the first month of the war, an astonishing thing happened: the President of the United States initiated a personal correspondence not with the Prime Minister, but with the head of the British Admiralty, by- passing all the ordinary diplomatic channels.
The messages that passed between the President and the First Lord were surrounded by a frantic secrecy, culminating in the affair of Tyler Kent, the American cipher clerk at the U.S. London embassy who was tried and imprisoned by the British authorities. The problem was that some of the messages contained allusions to Roosevelt’s agreement even before the war began to a blatantly unneutral cooperation with a belligerent Britain.
On June 10, 1939, George VI and his wife, Queen Mary, visited the Roosevelts at Hyde Park. In private conversations with the King, Roosevelt promised full support for Britain in case of war. He intended to set up a zone in the Atlantic to be patrolled by the U.S. Navy, and, according to the King’s notes, the President stated that “if he saw a U boat he would sink her at once & wait for the consequences.” The biographer of George VI, Wheeler-Bennett, considered that these conversations “contained the germ of the future Bases-for-Destroyers deal, and also of the Lend-Lease Agreement itself.” In communicating with the First Lord of the Admiralty, Roosevelt was aware that he was in touch with the one member of Chamberlain’s cabinet whose belligerence matched his own.
In 1940, Churchill at last became Prime Minister, ironically enough when the Chamberlain government resigned because of the Norwegian fiasco which Churchill, more than anyone else, had helped to bring about. As he had fought against a negotiated peace after the fall of Poland, so he continued to resist any suggestion of negotiations with Hitler. Many of the relevant documents are still sealed after all these years but it is clear that a strong peace party existed in the country and the government. It included Lloyd George in the House of Commons, and Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, in the Cabinet. Even after the fall of France, Churchill rejected Hitler’s renewed peace overtures. This, more than anything else, is supposed to be the foundation of his greatness. The British historian John Charmley raised a storm of outraged protest when he suggested that a negotiated peace in 1940 might have been to the advantage of Britain and Europe. A Yale historian, writing in the New York Times Book Review, referred to Charmley’s thesis as “morally sickening.” Yet Charmley’s scholarly and detailed work makes the crucial point that Churchill’s adamant refusal even to listen to peace terms in 1940 doomed what he claimed was dearest to him the Empire and a Britain that was non-socialist and independent in world affairs. One may add that it probably also doomed European Jewry. It is amazing that half a century after the fact, there are critical theses concerning World War II that are off-limits to historical debate.
Lloyd George, Halifax, and the others were open to a compromise peace because they understood that Britain and the Dominions alone could not defeat Germany. After the fall of France, Churchill’s aim of total victory could be realized only under one condition: that the United States become embroiled in another world war. No wonder that Churchill put his heart and soul into ensuring precisely that.
After a talk with Churchill, Joseph Kennedy, American ambassador to Britain, noted: “Every hour will be spent by the British in trying to figure out how we can be gotten in.” When he left from Lisbon on a ship to New York, Kennedy pleaded with the State Department to announce that if the ship should happen to blow up mysteriously in the mid-Atlantic, the United States would not consider it a cause for war with Germany. In his unpublished memoirs, Kennedy wrote: “I thought that would give me some protection against Churchill’s placing a bomb on the ship.”
Kennedy’s fears were perhaps not exaggerated. For, while it had been important for British policy in World War I, involving America was the sine qua non of Churchill’s policy in World War II. In Franklin Roosevelt, he found a ready accomplice.
That Roosevelt, through his actions and private words, evinced a clear design for war before December 7, 1941, has never really been in dispute. Arguments have raged over such questions as his possible foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack. In 1948, Thomas A. Bailey, diplomatic historian at Stanford, already put the real pro-Roosevelt case:
Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor. . . . He was like a physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient’s own good. . . . The country was overwhelmingly noninterventionist to the very day of Pearl Harbor, and an overt attempt to lead the people into war would have resulted in certain failure and an almost certain ousting of Roosevelt in 1940, with a complete defeat of his ultimate aims.
Churchill himself never bothered to conceal Roosevelt’s role as co-conspirator. In January, 1941, Harry Hopkins visited London. Churchill described him as “the most faithful and perfect channel of communication between the President and me . . . the main prop and animator of Roosevelt himself”:
I soon comprehended [Hopkins’s] personal dynamism and the outstanding importance of his mission . . . here was an envoy from the President of supreme importance to our life. With gleaming eye and quiet, constrained passion he said: “The President is determined that we shall win the war together. Make no mistake about it. He has sent me here to tell you that all costs and by all means he will carry you through, no matter what happens to him there is nothing that he will not do so far as he has human power.” There he sat, slim, frail, ill, but absolutely glowing with refined comprehension of the Cause. It was to be the defeat, ruin, and slaughter of Hitler, to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties and aims.
In 1976, the public finally learned the story of William Stephenson, the British agent code named “Intrepid,” sent by Churchill to the United States in 1940. Stephenson set up headquarters in Rockefeller Center, with orders to use any means necessary to help bring the United States into the war. With the full knowledge and cooperation of Roosevelt and the collaboration of federal agencies, Stephenson and his 300 or so agents “intercepted mail, tapped wires, cracked safes, kidnapped, . . . rumor mongered” and incessantly smeared their favorite targets, the “isolationists.” Through Stephenson, Churchill was virtually in control of William Donovan’s organization, the embryonic U. S. intelligence service.
Churchill even had a hand in the barrage of pro-British, anti-German propaganda that issued from Hollywood in the years before the United States entered the war. Gore Vidal, in Screening History, perceptively notes that starting around 1937, Americans were subjected to one film after another glorifying England and the warrior heroes who built the Empire. As spectators of these productions, Vidal says: “We served neither Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis; we served the Crown.” A key Hollywood figure in generating the movies that “were making us all weirdly English” was the Hungarian u201Amigru201A and friend of Churchill, Alexander Korda. Vidal very aptly writes:
For those who find disagreeable today’s Zionist propaganda, I can only say that gallant little Israel of today must have learned a great deal from the gallant little Englanders of the 1930s. The English kept up a propaganda barrage that was to permeate our entire culture . . . Hollywood was subtly and not so subtly infiltrated by British propagandists.
While the Americans were being worked on, the two confederates consulted on how to arrange for direct hostilities between the United States and Germany. In August, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met at the Atlantic conference. Here they produced the Atlantic Charter, with its “four freedoms,” including “the freedom from want” a blank-check to spread Anglo American Sozialpolitik around the globe. When Churchill returned to London, he informed the Cabinet of what had been agreed to. Thirty years later, the British documents were released. Here is how the New York Times reported the revelations:
Formerly top secret British Government papers made public today said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Prime Minister Winston Churchill in August, 1941, that he was looking for an incident to justify opening hostilities against Nazi Germany. . . . On August 19 Churchill reported to the War Cabinet in London on other aspects of the Newfoundland [Atlantic Charter] meeting that were not made public. . . . “He [Roosevelt] obviously was determined that they should come in. If he were to put the issue of peace and war to Congress, they would debate it for months,” the Cabinet minutes added. “The President had said he would wage war but not declare it and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack American forces. . . . Everything was to be done to force an incident.”
On July 15, 1941, Admiral Little, of the British naval delegation in Washington, wrote to Admiral Pound, the First Sea Lord: “the brightest hope for getting America into the war lies in the escorting arrangements to Iceland, and let us hope the Germans will not be slow in attacking them.” Little added, perhaps jokingly: “Otherwise I think it would be best for us to organise an attack by our own submarines and preferably on the escort!” A few weeks earlier, Churchill, looking for a chance to bring America into the war, wrote to Pound regarding the German warship, Prinz Eugen: “It would be better for instance that she should be located by a U.S. ship as this might tempt her to fire on that ship, thus providing the incident for which the U.S. government would be so grateful.” Incidents in the North Atlantic did occur, increasingly, as the United States approached war with Germany.
But Churchill did not neglect the “back door to war” embroiling the United States with Japan as a way of bringing America into the conflict with Hitler. Sir Robert Craigie, the British ambassador to Tokyo, like the American ambassador Joseph Grew, was working feverishly to avoid war. Churchill directed his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, to whip Craigie into line:
He should surely be told forthwith that the entry of the United States into war either with Germany and Italy or with Japan, is fully conformable with British interests. Nothing in the munitions sphere can compare with the importance of the British Empire and the United States being co-belligerent.
Churchill threw his influence into the balance to harden American policy towards Japan, especially in the last days before the Pearl Harbor attack. A sympathetic critic of Churchill, Richard Lamb, has recently written:
Was [Churchill] justified in trying to provoke Japan to attack the United States? . . . in 1941 Britain had no prospect of defeating Germany without the aid of the USA as an active ally. Churchill believed Congress would never authorize Roosevelt to declare war on Germany. . . . In war, decisions by national leaders must be made according to their effect on the war effort. There is truth in the old adage: “All’s fair in love and war.”
No wonder that, in the House of Commons, on February 15, 1942, Churchill declared, of America’s entry into the war: “This is what I have dreamed of, aimed at, worked for, and now it has come to pass.”
Churchill’s devotees by no means hold his role in bringing America into World War II against him. On the contrary, they count it in his favor. Harry Jaffa, in his uninformed and frantic apology, seems to be the last person alive who refuses to believe that the Man of Many Centuries was responsible to any degree for America’s entry into the war: after all, wasn’t it the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor?
But what of the American Republic? What does it mean for us that a President collaborated with a foreign head of government to entangle us in a world war? The question would have mattered little to Churchill. He had no concern with the United States as a sovereign, independent nation, with its own character and place in the scheme of things. For him, Americans were one of “the English- speaking peoples.” He looked forward to a common citizenship for Britons and Americans, a “mixing together,” on the road to Anglo American world hegemony.
But the Churchill Roosevelt intrigue should, one might think, matter to Americans. Here, however, criticism is halted before it starts. A moral postulate of our time is that in pursuit of the destruction of Hitler, all things were permissible. Yet why is it self-evident that morality required a crusade against Hitler in 1939 and 1940, and not against Stalin? At that point, Hitler had slain his thousands, but Stalin had already slain his millions. In fact, up to June, 1941, the Soviets behaved far more murderously toward the Poles in their zone of occupation than the Nazis did in theirs. Around 1,500,000 Poles were deported to the Gulag, with about half of them dying within the first two years. As Norman Davies writes: “Stalin was outpacing Hitler in his desire to reduce the Poles to the condition of a slave nation.” Of course, there were balance-of-power considerations that created distinctions between the two dictators. But it has yet to be explained why there should exist a double standard ordaining that compromise with one dictator would have been “morally sickening,” while collaboration with the other was morally irreproachable.
Ralph Raico is professor of history at Buffalo State College and a senior scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Due to space limitations, the 169 detailed footnotes – which thoroughly document all assertions in Professor Raico’s paperRaico’s paper – are not included. They are, of course, included in the printed version of the paper, published in The Costs of War, available from the Mises Institute.
