Not So Special - an Amazing Account of the USA's unwillingness to Enter World War Two

For reasons I’ll explain in time (but not today) , I’ve been reading a book which has (as far as I know) only been published in the USA, though it’s available here readily as a Kindle download. It’s called ‘Those Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight Over World War II’,  written by Lynne Olsen. As far as I can discover it has not been reviewed in this country. I would strongly urge the publishers, Random House, to release it here.

 

For it would be a revelation to millions of British people, who have a vague assumption that the USA is Britain’s natural ally and good friend, and that American intervention ‘on our side’ in the Hitler war was inevitable and popular.  The truth is that it nearly did not happen, and was bitterly unpopular with millions of ordinary, patriotic Americans.

British readers may now – 75 years later – at last be ready to learn this unwelcome and disturbing truth in all its fascinating detail.

If so, they should read it in conjunction with another shocker (which has been published here but has not got as much attention as it deserves),  Benn Steil’s ‘The Battle of Bretton Woods’, about Britain’s utter defeat at the hands of the USA in economic matters (the man who encompassed that defeat was Harry Dexter White, a senior American official  but also – quite astonishingly – a Soviet agent).

 

‘Those Angry Days’ recounts the extraordinary period in American history between the Munich agreement and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Its principal villain is Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in this account appears as a pathetic broken reed, vacillating, feeble, indecisive and tricky, as well as vindictive to those who crossed him and willing to sanction shockingly underhand methods against opponents. Charles Lindbergh, the great flyer, and dogegd opponent of intervention, comes across as more tragic than bad – a man so determined to speak what he saw as the truth that he did not care if his words and actions helped the cause of wicked men.

 

But even to me (and I have long known that the USA is a foreign country which has no special regard for Britain and is often hostile to it when our interests conflict, as they must) the book is full of revelations.

 

Let me list a few : The presence of active Anglophobes at high levels in the US armed forces, the support for the neutralist movement ‘America First’ of figures such as John F.Kennedy,  Gore Vidal and Kingman Brewster (later a well-liked US ambassador to London), the huge public support for staying out of the war, the general mistrust of Britain, thanks to what was regarded as our misleading propaganda during the 1914 war, and Britain’s default on its war debts to the USA in 1934;  the pitiful weakness of America’s army and air force in 1939, the extraordinary (and in my view historically decisive) events which led to the selection of the anti-neutralist Wendell Willkie as Republican candidate for the 1940 presidential election, the closeness and dishonesty of that election, the narrowness by which lend-lease passed through Congress, the even greater narrowness by which the newly-conscripted US Army avoided disbandment in 1941, Roosevelt’s repeated failure to put his promises of support into effect, the dismal quantities of real aid which lend-lease produced at the beginning, the accounts of Hitler’s repeated restraint of his Navy, so as to give Roosevelt no pretext for getting involved in the battle of the Atlantic  (so much for the idea that Hitler was an irrational carpet-biter).

 

Then there are the various luncheon-clubs and networks (coincidence theorists would call them coincidences)  through which interventionists covertly co-ordinated speeches,  articles and actions sought to capture public opinion, and the US government,  for their cause.

 

It mentions, but not in enough detail for me, the terrible stripping of British assets in 1939 and 1940, as the price for lend-lease, including the sale at knock-down prices of valuable enterprises such as American Viscose. It hasn’t so far (I’ve still not finished) described  the humiliating emptying of Britain’s gold reserves  - an amazing operation involving nerve-racking shipments of great weights of disguised bullion (labelled ‘fish’) in warships through terrible storms, from Plymouth to Halifax and then on to a secret vault in Montreal, guarded by a detachment of Mounties,  from which they could eventually ( I presume) find their way by land to Fort Knox.

 

It also describes, with cold accuracy, the extent of naked anti-Semitism in the USA at that time,  with open Judophobic prejudice expressed in government offices, and quotas for Jews at Ivy League universities. This unlovely feature of the [pre-war USA  went further than the book describes ( and astyed, as far as I know, into the 1950s in some places) .  When I lived in Washington DC, for instance, many older people still remembered (though they spoke softly when they did so)  that certain areas and apartment blocks had until quite recently been ‘restricted’, that is, Jews were forbidden to live in them. The same was true in New York City.

 

How all this would have ended if the Japanese had *not* attacked Pearl Harbor, and if Hitler had not then declared war on the USA in fulfilment of his treaty obligations, I do not know. There’s a ‘Fatherland’ type novel to be written about a world in which the USA stayed out, and Stalin still beat Hitler (as I think he would have done). What sort of Europe would that have produced? And what sort of Far East?

 

If the Republicans had selected an isolationist Presidential candidate at Philadelphia in 1940 ( as they would have done in the absence of a brilliantly-orchestrated campaign for Willkie) Roosevelt would have trimmed still further in that direction. He might never have introduced Lend-Lease or the Draft . The September 1940 destroyers-for-bases deal (some of these ancient ships actual ended up in the Soviet navy)  might also not have happened.  

 

But something like Bretton Woods, at which Britain was definitively forced to abandon its Empire and all that went with it, probably would have happened – though perhaps the Soviet influence on it would have been more obvious, rather than exercised through Dexter White, a secret agent who was partly paid for his work in expensive carpets.  

 

From 1940 onwards, Britain had irrevocably lost the economic and military capacity to hold on to what it had, and the USA was determined to use this opportunity to become top nation. American aid to Britain during the war was just enough to keep us fighting, but not remotely enough to allow us to recover from the bankruptcy the first stage of the war had caused.

 

The USA is another country. It has different interests from us. I love the USA and like its people, but I never make the mistake of imagining that they would allow any sentiment to get in the way of their national interests when they differ from ours. Nor should they. Nor should we. It would be good for our relations if we dropped the sentimental gush about Churchill, and recognised the true position.