Impossible Hawks

On December 8, 1940, Winston Churchill wrote to Franklin Roosevelt. The situation was indeed grim, France having fallen to the Germans and the United Kingdom pushed right off Continental Europe. Defeats in the Pacific were some of the worst in the long history of the British Nation. The battle was now raging over English skies, the island isolated in every conceivable way.

The primary purpose for the British Prime Minister’s communication to the US President was money. He had run out of it. Without some form of desperate aid, Churchill knew they were finished.

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 salable 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.

Not many Americans agreed. Before Pearl Harbor, the US attitude was very different. Americans had had enough of European wars. Constant strife wasn’t a 20th-century invention. For all their lives, people in the US had been reading and hearing about European battles and conflicts. They occasionally participated.

At the outbreak of WWII back in September 1939, the US Congress passed the Neutrality Act which FDR signed. Britain or any other willing belligerent could buy war materiel from US companies but only on a cash basis. The United States wouldn’t play favorites; if you had the money you could buy the goods.

The Johnson Act of 1934 had already made it illegal to offer credit to those nations still in arrears for the first big war. The US had lent huge sums to the UK in the teens, and they still hadn’t paid up by the outset of the second one.