A Longer Reply to Mr Warner

 

Mr Geoffrey Warner made several points in response to my recent article on the stripping bare of Britain by the USA). As they're all quite interesting, and as I hope very much to get him to respond to my answers, I'm reproducing his questions here, and putting my retorts beneath them, marked ***

 

Mr Warner : 'I'm not quite sure what point Mr Hitchens is trying to make in this brief note.'

***The article was entirely factual and without comment because I thought this was more likely to provoke thought than any furtehr expression of opinion. But if he wants comment, he can have it.

 

 Mr Warner says :'The use of the expression "stripping bare" in connection with the transfer of Britain's gold reserves to North America in 1940 suggests that the latter was an involuntary act on the part of the British government when in fact it was a British decision in order to prevent the gold in question from falling into enemy hands in the event of a successful German invasion.'

***This is an interesting contention. On what does he base it? The payment of coin or notes to those from whom you wish to purchase goods is indeed a 'voluntary' act, but if you do no do it you will not get the goods. So if you need the goods to survive, it is not really very voluntary. It may be that the transfer of gold direct from Britain to Canda( and on from there to the USA) might have been explained subsequently or at the time as a measure to protect it. As I understand it, some gold was shipped to Canada in the same ships (HMS Southampton and HMS Glasgow)  that escorted George VI's entourage there on his May-June 1939 royal visit (the King and Queen went by liner).

 

At this time,  our reserves were under grave strain from military spending (though nothing compared to what was to come). But also at that time most people believed that France was a great military power which was virtually impregnable against German attack, so any possibility of a German invasion of Britain was in the realm of fantasy.

 

So it is perhaps more likely that the May 1939 shipment( £30 million by the values of the time)  was in anticpation of the need to pay the USA for munitions in a war that was evidently fast-approaching by June 1939, rather than for safekeeping.

 

Further small shipments continued (usually only £2 million per ship) through the winter of 1939 and the Spring of 1940, rapidly increasing, with several enormous consignments of £30 million or £40 million per ship ( and one of £47 million) beginning in June 1940 (the time of Dunkirk and the invasion scare) and ending with a few much smaller shipments in February and April 1941.  How the gold cargoes in the USS Louisville got from Britain to Simonstown (or whether it was in fact newly-mined and had never left South Africa in the first place) I do not know and am seeking to find out. I still find it hard to accept that shipping it across the Atlantic in wartime, from Cape Town, was done for safekeeping. 

Mr Warner then says : 'The gold was returned from the USA and Canada subsequently.'

***Was it? When, in what quantities and by what means, in which ships and to which ports? I myself have never seen any account of this return. I would be hu gely grateful if Mr Warner could point me to his sources.

 

Some of the securities were certainly returned, as Alfred Draper records in 'Operation Fish', but have found no reference to the return of the gold in that book. Perhaps I have missed it. My impression was that it had all been spent and so no longer belonged to us.

Also, if the gold was being sent away for safekeeping a) why not send it to Australia, South Africa or New Zealand, then all British allies at least as close emoptyionally and politically to us as Canada, and physically much further away from the conflict and from the dangerous transatlantic sea-lanes? And b) why not keep it in Simonstown once it was there, rather than risking a dangerous transatlantic crossing to New York?

As for the cruiser "Louisville", the United States *was* technically neutral at the time and it was sensible for its commander prominently to display the American flag in order to avoid U-boat attack.

*** I couldn't agree more. Why take needless risks. But the assertion of neutrality, while carrying British gold to pay for American weapons to keep Britain in the war, seems to me to be paradoxical. I suspect that si why Mr Warner feels the need to ask what i am trying to say. the facts speak for themselves. I believe that when British seamen saw Irish ships crossing the Atlantic in the war, emblazoned with huge illuminated signs proclaiming 'Eire' (translation: 'Please don't sink us, we're neutral')  they tended to jeer a bit.

 

Mr Warner adds : 'I use the term "technically neutral" because the US was in fact actively helping the British in this instance and later on became active in the Battle of the Atlantic in support of the British and Canadian navies, as Chapter 11 of the memoirs of Admiral Karl Doenitz, the German U-boat commander, amply demonstrates. Indeed, Hitler would have had good grounds for declaring war on the United States well before he actually did so.'

 

Well, yes, and the interesting thing is how far both sides were ready to accept casualties and bombardment without considering it was a casus belli (justifiable cause of war) . Hitler, who seems to have gone mad after Pearl Harbor (presumably recognising, subconsciously, that he was bound to lose the war eventually) refused to be provoked into war by the US Navy, and Roosevelt refused to be provoked into war by the German Kriegsmarine, which actually sank the USS Reuben James, an antique destroyer, in October 1941 a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, with great loss of American lives. It is a very odd period of history, with two nations in daily naval conflict with each other yet not declaring general war.

 

Mr Warner continues : 'Finally, what was so wrong about Admiral Leahy's appointment as US Ambassador to Vichy France?'.

 

***Did I say there was? It was perfectly rational for the USA,  a neutral country, to maintain relations with Vichy France. That is the point. Had the USA's foreign policy been driven by a principled loathing for National Socilaism, Judophobia or any other aspect of the Hitlerian new order, no such embassy could have existed. But the USA (like everyone else) treated Germany and its allies and vassals as normal countries. The idea that World War Two was a war of principle was invented afterwards.

 

***As Mr Warner says :'The Americans were merely trying to "keep in" with Vichy'.

 

***I am not so sure he's right to say that they were doing so 'in order to prevent it from moving ever closer to Germany.' I'm not sure how it could have moved much closer to Germany than it already was, or would have remained if the New Order had survived. Nor can I see what the USA, in 1941, could have done to separate it from Germany, which after all occupied most of its territory at that time, and was well-placed to occupy the lot in case of trouble.  Once again, I'd be interested in some contemporary evidence (rather than post-hoc self-serving justification) to show that this was so.

 

Mr Warner concludes: 'Like Mr Hitchens, I am sceptical about the so-called "special relationship" between Britain and the United States, as it seems to be a very one-sided one and increasingly so. However, I feel that he is being a little too negative here.'

 

***I really can't see what's 'negative' about stating facts, little-known as many of them are (and why is that?) . It is Mr Warner's reaction to the stated, unadorned facts, entirely prompted  by his own feelings, which seems to me to suggest that I have hit the nail on the head. The USA is a foreign country, they do things differently there, and they have different interests from ours. We must get used to this.