The premise of British strategy was therefore, as Churchill put it to Roosevelt, that Britain would pay for as much as it could, but that ‘when we can pay no more you will give us the stuff all the same’. Perhaps not surprisingly, Roosevelt did not reply to this bold statement of British dependence. The tortured politics of World War I war debts were still fresh in the memory.31 Britain was to be driven to the point of financial exhaustion before Congress opened the floodgates of lend-lease in the spring of 1941. London, therefore, had every reason to be nervous. But Churchill’s gamble was
...more
