Their Finest Hour (67 page)

14. Moreover, we look to the industrial energy of the Republic for a reinforcement of our domestic capacity to manufacture combat aircraft. Without that reinforcement reaching us in substantial measure, we shall not achieve the massive preponderance in the air on which we must rely to loosen and disintegrate the German grip on Europe. We are at present engaged on a programme designed to increase our strength to seven thousand first-line aircraft by the spring of 1942. But it is abundantly clear that this programme will not suffice to give us the weight of superiority which will force open the doors of victory. In order to achieve such superiority, it is plain that we shall need the greatest production of aircraft which the United States of America is capable of sending us. It is our anxious hope that in the teeth of continuous bombardment we shall realise the greater part of the production which we have planned in this country. But not even with the addition to our squadrons of all the aircraft which, under present arrangements, we may derive from planned output in the United States can we hope to achieve the necessary ascendancy. May I invite you then, Mr. President, to give earnest consideration to an immediate order on joint account for a further two thousand combat aircraft a month? Of these aircraft, I would submit, the highest possible proportion should be heavy bombers, the weapon on which, above all others, we depend to shatter the foundations of German military power. I am aware of the formidable task that this would impose upon the industrial organisation of the United States. Yet, in our heavy need, we call with confidence to the most resourceful and ingenious technicians in the world. We ask for an unexampled effort, believing that it can be made.

15. You have also received information about the needs of our armies. In the munitions sphere, in spite of enemy bombing, we are making steady progress here. Without your continued assistance in the supply of machine tools and in further releases from stock of certain articles, we could not hope to equip as many as fifty divisions in 1941. I am grateful for the arrangements, already practically completed, for your aid in the equipment of the army which we have already planned, and for the provision of the American type of weapons for an additional ten divisions in time for the campaign of 1942. But when the tide of dictatorship begins to recede, many countries trying to regain their freedom may be asking for arms, and there is no source to which they can look except the factories of the United States. I must, therefore, also urge the importance of expanding to the utmost American productive capacity for small arms, artillery, and tanks.

16. I am arranging to present you with a complete programme of the munitions of all kinds which we seek to obtain from you, the greater part of which is, of course, already agreed. An important economy of time and effort will be produced if the types selected for the United States Services should, whenever possible, conform to those which have proved their merit under the actual conditions of war. In this way reserves of guns and ammunition and of airplanes become interchangeable, and are by that very fact augmented. This is, however, a sphere so highly technical that I do not enlarge upon it.

17. Last of all, I come to the question of Finance. The more rapid and abundant the flow of munitions and ships which you are able to send us, the sooner will our dollar credits be exhausted. They are already, as you know, very heavily drawn upon by the payments we have made to date. Indeed, as you know, the orders already placed or under negotiation, including the expenditure settled or pending for creating munitions factories in the United States, many times exceed the total exchange resources remaining at the disposal of Great Britain. The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies. While we will do our utmost, and shrink from no proper sacrifice to make payments across the Exchange, I believe you will agree that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries. We here should be unable, after the war, to purchase the large balance of imports from the United States over and above the volume of our exports which is agreeable to your tariffs and industrial economy. Not only should we in Great Britain suffer cruel privations, but widespread unemployment in the United States would follow the curtailment of American exporting power.

18. Moreover, I do not believe that the Government and people of the United States would find it in accordance with the principles which guide them to confine the help which they have so generously promised only to such munitions of war and commodities as could be immediately paid for. You may be certain that we shall prove ourselves ready to suffer and sacrifice to the utmost for the Cause, and that we glory in being its champions. The rest we leave with confidence to you and to your people, being sure that ways and means will be found which future generations on both sides of the Atlantic will approve and admire.

19. If, as I believe, you are convinced, Mr. President, that the defeat of the Nazi and Fascist tyranny is a matter of high consequence to the people of the United States and to the Western Hemisphere, you will regard this letter not as an appeal for aid, but as a statement of the minimum action necessary to achieve our common purpose.

A table was added showing the losses by enemy action of British, Allied, and neutral merchant tonnage for the periods given.
⁴

The letter reached our great friend when he was cruising, on board an American warship, the
Tuscaloosa,
in the sunlight of the Caribbean Sea. He had only his own intimates around him. Harry Hopkins, then unknown to me, told me later that Mr. Roosevelt read and re-read this letter as he sat alone in his deck-chair, and that for two days he did not seem to have reached any clear conclusion. He was plunged in intense thought, and brooded silently.

From all this there sprang a wonderful decision. It was never a question of the President not knowing what he wanted to do. His problem was how to carry his country with him and to persuade Congress to follow his guidance. According to Stettinius, the President, as early as the late summer, had suggested at a meeting of the Defence Advisory Commission on Shipping Resources that. “It should not he necessary for the British to take their own funds and have ships built in the United States, or for us to lend them money for this purpose. There is no reason why we should not take a finished vessel and lease it to them for the duration of the emergency.” It seems that this idea had originated in the Treasury Department, whose lawyers, especially Oscar S. Cox, of Maine, had been stirred by Secretary Morgenthau. It appeared that by a statute of 1892 the Secretary for War, “when in his discretion it will be for the public good,” could lease Army property if not required for public use for a period of not longer than five years. Precedents for the use of this statute, by the
lease
of various Army items from time to time, were on record.

Thus the word
“lease”
and the idea of applying the lease principle to meeting British needs had been in President Roosevelt’s mind for some time as an alternative to a policy of indefinite loans which would soon far outstrip all possibilities of repayment. Now suddenly all this sprang into decisive action, and the glorious conception of Lend-Lease was proclaimed.

The President returned from the Caribbean on December 16 and broached his plan at his press conference next day. He used a simple illustration:

Suppose my neighbour’s house catches fire and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out the fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, “Neighbour, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.” No! What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want fifteen dollars – I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.

And again:

There is absolutely no doubt in the mind of a very overwhelming number of Americans that the best immediate defence of the United States is the success of Great Britain defending itself; and that, therefore, quite aside from our historic and current interest in the survival of Democracy in the world as a whole, it is equally important from a selfish point of view and of American defence that we should do everything possible to help the British Empire to defend itself.

Finally:

What I am trying to do is to eliminate the dollar sign.

On this foundation the ever-famous Lend-Lease Bill was at once prepared for submission to Congress. I described this to Parliament later as “the most unsordid act in the history of any nation.” Once it was accepted by Congress, it transformed immediately the whole position. It made us free to shape by agreement long-term plans of vast extent for all our needs. There was no provision for repayment. There was not even to be a formal account kept in dollars or sterling. What we had was lent or leased to us because our continued resistance to the Hitler tyranny was deemed to be of vital interest to the great Republic. According to President Roosevelt, the defence of the United States and not dollars was henceforth to determine where American weapons were to go.

* * * * *

It was at this moment, the most important in his public career, that Philip Lothian was taken from us. Shortly after his return to Washington, he fell suddenly and gravely ill. He worked unremittingly to the end. On December 12, in the full tide of success, he died. This was a loss to the nation and to the Cause. He was mourned by wide circles of friends on both sides of the ocean. To me, who had been in such intimate contact with him a fortnight before, it was a personal shock. I paid my tribute to him in a House of Commons united in deep respect for his work and memory.

* * * * *

I had now to turn immediately to the choice of his successor. It seemed that our relations with the United States at this time required as Ambassador an outstanding national figure and a statesman versed in every aspect of world politics. Having ascertained from the President that my suggestion would be acceptable, I invited Mr. Lloyd George to take the post. He had not felt able to join the War Cabinet in July, and was not happily circumstanced in British politics. His outlook on the war and the events leading up to it was from a different angle from mine. There could be no doubt, however, that he was our foremost citizen, and that his incomparable gifts and experience would be devoted to the success of his mission. I had a long talk with him in the Cabinet Room, and also at luncheon on a second day. He showed genuine pleasure at having been invited. “I tell my friends,” he said, “I have had honourable offers made to me by the Prime Minister.” He was sure that at the age of eighty-two he ought not to undertake so exacting a task. As a result of my long conversations with him I was conscious that he had aged even in the months which had passed since I had asked him to join the War Cabinet, and with regret but also with conviction I abandoned my plan.

I next turned to Lord Halifax, whose prestige in the Conservative Party stood high, and was enhanced by his being at the Foreign Office. For a Foreign Secretary to become an Ambassador marks in a unique manner the importance of the mission. His high character was everywhere respected, yet at the same time his record in the years before the war and the way in which events had moved left him exposed to much disapprobation and even hostility from the Labour side of our National Coalition. I knew that he was conscious of this himself.

When I made him this proposal, which was certainly not a personal advancement, he contented himself with saying in a simple and dignified manner that he would serve wherever he was thought to be most useful. In order to emphasise still further the importance of his duties, I arranged that he should resume his function as a member of the War Cabinet whenever he came home on leave. This arrangement worked without the slightest inconvenience owing to the qualities and experience of the personalities involved, and for six years thereafter, both under the National Coalition and the Labour-Socialist Government, Halifax discharged the work of Ambassador to the United States with conspicuous and ever-growing influence and success.

President Roosevelt, Mr. Hull and other high personalities in Washington were extremely pleased with the selection of Lord Halifax. Indeed it was at once apparent to me that the President greatly preferred it to my first proposal. The appointment of the new Ambassador was received with marked approval both in America and at home, and was judged in every way adequate and appropriate to the scale of events.

* * * * *

I had no doubt who should fill the vacancy at the Foreign Office. On all the great issues of the past four years I had, as these pages have shown, dwelt in close agreement with Anthony Eden. I have described my anxieties and emotions when he parted company with Mr. Chamberlain in the spring of 1938. Together we had abstained from the vote on Munich. Together we had resisted the party pressures brought to bear upon us in our constituencies during the winter of that melancholy year. We had been united in thought and sentiment at the outbreak of the war and as colleagues during its progress. The greater part of Eden’s public life had been devoted to the study of foreign affairs. He had held the splendid office of Foreign Secretary with distinction, and had resigned it when only forty years of age for reasons which are in retrospect, and at this time, viewed with the approval of all parties in the State. He had played a fine part as Secretary of State for War during this terrific year, and his conduct of Armv affairs had brought us very close together. We thought alike, even without consultation, on a very great number of practical issues as they arose from day to day. I looked forward to an agreeable and harmonious comradeship between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, and this hope was certainly fulfilled during the four and a half years of war and policy which lay before us. Eden was sorry to leave the War Office, in all the stresses and excitements of which he was absorbed; but he returned to the Foreign Office like a man going home.