A World at Arms (34 page)

With a combination of caution, daring, and political shrewdness, Roosevelt threaded his way through these complications.
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He decided that some World War I weapons should be sent to England; the first large shipment began to move on June 24.
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Some had been shipped earlier and more would follow. Clearly such weapons could help arm the Home Guard and replace at least a fraction of the artillery the British army had lost on the continent.
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It would encourage the British to
hold out–as subject on which there was as yet not great confidence in Washington–but without inordinate cost to American defense. The provision of destroyers to the British navy was a far more difficult matter. The British desperately needed these both to protect shipping and to relieve warships to cope with any invasion attempt. Churchill repeatedly asked for over-age United States World War I destroyers to be turned over, and Lord Lothian reinforced this pressure.
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But could destroyers be spared, could they be legally transferred, and would they not perhaps fall into German hands? The British attack on the French fleet was certainly in part calculated to show the Americans that England intended to fight on. The President also insisted on assurances from London against Washington’s greatest nightmare: that the British fleet might be handed over to Germany. The legal barriers to a destroyer transfer, which weighed heavily with the President,
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were dealt with by a double approach. There appeared, at least to some, to be a legitimate procedure and, far more important, the destroyers came to be traded for bases instead. Lord Lothian early saw the necessity for Britain making naval bases in its Western Hemisphere possessions available to the United States on a 99–year lease basis; and a reluctant Churchill eventually came around on this point, solving British susceptibilities by turning over two bases as a free gift in addition to the five exchanged for 50 destroyers.
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Furthermore, the whole transfer was closely associated with an agreement for joint defense between Canada and the United States, a subject on which United States opinion was more willing to be receptive.
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As Roosevelt saw these issues being resolved in a way that involved great political risks at home but with a Britain appearing to have at least some chance of holding on, agreement was reached and the destroyers reactivated for transfer.
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This exchange had symbolic as well as practical significance. As the destroyers (and some smaller ships) began to join the British navy, and as American forces began to develop the new bases, the two powers were obviously and publicly associated in a common defense. Clearly the American government was now gambling on Britain’s survival, had put aside all thoughts of urging a compromise peace,
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and would build up its own defences alongside a program of support for Great Britain.

It is not a coincidence that the public controversy in the United States over the destroyers for bases deal was immediately followed by an even more heated debate over the proposal for the country’s first peacetime draft. In the fall of 1940 the United States began a first serious effort to build up its military forces, a project that took years to implement, but the great German victories had provided the impetus for starting it. The United States-Canadian agreement made it clear that if the British
government ever did have to move to Canada, there at least it could count on United States support against the Axis. Already in July 1940, President Roosevelt had also initiated the development of a chain of airfields which would make it possible to fly airplanes from the United States to Latin America and later across the South Atlantic to connect with the Takoradi air route from the British Gold Coast (now Ghana) to Egypt and the theater of war in the Eastern Mediterranean.
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The President had ordered an investigation of the possibility of developing atomic weapons in the fall of 1939; that program would not acquire the Belgian stocks of uranium until September 1942 (using Canadian ore in the interim), but the uranium itself was already stored in the United States.
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A whole host of new initiatives was under way; they would take years to become effective, but the critical decisions date to the summer of 1940.

The American supplies that were beginning to move across the Atlantic in slowly greater volume had to be paid for out of Britain’s dwindling financial resources and carried on ocean routes threatened by German submarines. Here were problems for the future; but the present looked faintly better for Britain. The United States could see the cliffs of Dover as important to its defense. In the great wars against continental opponents of the past–the Spain of Phillip II, the France of Louis XIV and of Napoleon–the British had fought by combining a substantial navy with small land forces and extensive financial support for continental allies. In World War I, Britain fielded a huge land army in addition to providing a big navy, a large air force, and massive financing of her allies. Now there were no continental allies, there was no large army, and her financial resources were not even adequate for her own war effort. It would remain to be seen whether the United States would do financially for Britain what the latter had so often done for her own allies in past conflicts.

If the support of the United States was increasingly a possibility but of only remote effectiveness, what about a revived France–or French colonial empire–and the Soviet Union? General de Gaulle tried to rally Frenchmen, especially in the French colonial empire, to the continued war. He was, however, greatly hindered in this endeavor by three factors over which he had no control. The first was his own status in the eyes of other Frenchmen. Unlike Marshal Pétain, who was then a revered leader with an established reputation, de Gaulle was as yet a practically unknown officer who had held neither high command nor high civilian office. His name later became a household word, but when he broadcast in the name of a French National Committee on June 23, that was decidedly not the case. He was, or put on the air of being, certain of
his destiny; few others were. Secondly, the defeatist attitudes of most Frenchmen were, if anything, reinforced by the very step the British government took ten days later to prevent the French fleet from being handed over to or seized by the Germans. The same action which reassured the Americans that the British were in the war to stay was not likely to encourage Frenchmen to join them.

Finally, the authorities in the French colonial territories were not only traditionally anti-British in their orientation, but they had acquired the
ideé fixe
that the British only hoped to seize parts of the French colonial empire for themselves. This fear, not held by the officials in the Dutch and Belgian colonial empires, restrained most from siding with what they perceived as the main enemy of France overseas, an attitude reinforced by the restraint Germany imposed on Italy in the 1940 armistice negotiations. It is hardly a coincidence that the one portion of the French colonial empire in which a serious movement for a break with Vichy and a return to the war developed in 1940 was that part where the local officials had good reason to expect a German claim to the land.

Before World War I, a major German colonial possession had been the Cameroons in West Africa. After the war, a slice had been turned over as a mandate to the adjacent British colony of Nigeria, but the bulk had been assigned as a mandate to France. The French, however, had turned over to their other colonies in French Equatorial Africa those portions of the mandated territory which had been ceded to Germany as part of the settlement of the second Morocco crisis of 1911, and these parts had thereupon been reincorporated into the colonies of Chad, Gabon and the French Congo. It was in all these areas that concern–entirely justified as will be shown–about a return of German control contributed to a revolt against Vichy in late August. In a few days, officials supporting de Gaulle took over not only Chad, whose governor was sympathetic to de Gaulle, but Cameroons and the French Congo as well.
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An attempt in September by a joint British-Free French expedition to seize the critical port of Dakar in French West Africa as a part of an effort to obtain the defection of all or most of that area failed miserably. While the British came to blame the Free French for this disaster, the level of confusion and incompetence was sufficiently high for all participants to have a major share. The fiasco revealed a number of things: that the British were only making the barest beginnings of knowing how to launch offensive operations of the most minimal sort; that the Free French had little support among the French forces in West Africa; and that in obedience to Pétain, most officers were prepared to lead their men in fighting the British and other Frenchmen, but
not
the
Germans. This dramatic rebuff to British hopes was at least partially off-set by a further Free French success in the face of the most extreme British reluctance: from their newly acquired bases in French Equatorial Africa they completed their control of that area by the occupation of Gabon in October and November of 1940.
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Free French control of French Equatorial Africa had symbolic and practical impact on the further evolution of World War II. Symbolically it provided de Gaulle with a substantial territorial base and thus a sign of status. It could not yet elevate the French National Committee to the status of a government-in-exile like those of Poland, Norway, Belgium and Holland, to which Czechoslovakia was added on July 21, but it made the whole concept of a continuing fight of some kind alongside but independent of England plausible.

Fort Lamy (now called Ndjamena), the capital of Chad, was not only the symbolic center of a reviving French alternative to the regime in Vichy, but it was also a very important place on the map of Africa. The Takoradi route for air reinforcements to the Middle East, which has already been mentioned and which grew in importance in 1941 and 1942, crossed Chad with airplanes stopping at Fort Lamy on their way from Nigeria to the great supply center of Khartoum in the Sudan. At times thereafter the Germans and the Vichy French would discuss ways of recovering the areas lost to de Gaulle, but nothing substantial ever came of those talks. Hitler as well as the Vichy authorities were eager to recover the colonies which had turned to de Gaulle; but the Vichy authorities lacked the competence and Hitler the confidence in them to release sufficient French forces for such operations to make a successful effort.
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Furthermore, the possibility that other portions of French Africa might follow the example of the equatorial colonies and join de Gaulle thereafter restrained Germany in its dealings with Spain and Italy-any promises to either could leak out and inspire further defections that Germany could not prevent. The whole of French North and West Africa was at risk, and Hitler would look to these issues with some concern throughout the fall of 1940 and the following winter. The actual presence of a French regime under de Gaulle in control of African territories thus had a meaningful impact on the war. It was a long road from Fort Lamy, Douala, Brazzaville, and Libreville to Paris; but then, one had to start somewhere.

Whatever the eventual role of Free French forces, they could hardly affect the situation in 1940, and their armament in any case depended
on American supplies at some distant date because the African territories coming under de Gaulle’s control contained neither stores of weapons nor munition factories. The situation of the Soviet Union was entirely different. It had a large army, which could be expected to be assimilating the lessons of the war with Finland, and it was thought by some in London unlikely to be overjoyed by the rapid German victory in the West.

Under these circumstances, the British government tried to persuade the Soviet leadership to shift from a pro-German to a pro-British stance in the conflict. Consideration was given to the possibility of recognizing the Soviet territorial gains in Eastern Europe as a way of seeing in them a barrier to German expansion, a view Churchill had expressed in the fall of 1939.
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To explore this issue, the British government sent Sir Stafford Cripps to Moscow. Long strongly pro-Soviet in his views, Sir Stafford had visited the Soviet Union early in 1940 where he had met Molotov and other Soviet officials. Originally sent to negotiate a trade agreement, he was made ambassador when the Soviet Union insisted that any talks be at the ambassadorial level. Optimistic to begin with, Cripps quickly became disillusioned in Moscow, and only a personal letter from Churchill to Stalin provided an opportunity for him to take his case for better Anglo-Soviet relations to the Soviet leader. In the process, he learned from Stalin that it had been the desire to destroy the European equilibrium which had brought him together with Hitler, and that the Soviet Union had no interest in restoring the pre-war situation. Stalin professed to see no danger threatening the Soviet Union from Germany.
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The Soviet leader may well have been surprised at the speed with which the Germans had won in the West once he had made it possible for them to concentrate all their forces on one front, and there is evidence that he found it advisable to take some lessons from the military experience of the German campaign in France. The earlier dismantling of larger Soviet armored formations was now reversed.
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But he not only gave the Germans a full and accurate account of his talks with Sir Stafford,
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he provided them with far more substantial assistance. In the summer of 1940, he ordered Soviet ice breakers to make it possible for a German auxiliary cruiser to pass through the Arctic waters north of Siberia, so that it could engage in sinking British ships in the Pacific Ocean.
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Long before this auxiliary cruiser reached the Pacific, the Soviet government was also doing its best to accelerate the shipment of important supplies to Germany both from its own stocks and from East Asia across the Transsiberian railway.
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