Neutrality As A Weapon - The U.S.A. Takes A Hand

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NEUTRALITY AS A WEAPON - THE U.S.A. TAKES A HAND


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WWII* Chapter 8

Although by spring 1941, as the Blitz in London passed its peak, the USA was still neutral, President Roosevelt's administration, usually but not always with the consent of Congress, was taking an increasingly active role in Britain's lone struggle to resist the onslaught of Nazism in Europe. His doing so was, in traditionally neutral America, something of a political hot potato. To understand the events of the time, it is necessary to look back a little at the nature of America's view of European conflict.
The involvement of the United States in the First World War had been a major psychological trauma for a nation reared and developed on the concept of isolationism. Then, far more than now, the United States was a nation of immigrants, still retaining close nationalistic ties with their homelands. When the Great War began in 1914, and throughout 1915, thousands of Americans left their now-native shores to return to Europe and fight for the Kaiser. Nonetheless, the nation as a whole wished wholeheartedly to remain neutral; to keep clear of a conflict that could benefit them nothing, but damage them greatly. Despite this wish, Americans could not restrain their anger at the reports of German brutality in Belgium and France which repeatedly reached the press in the USA, probably with assistance from (and exaggeration by) the Allied propaganda machine.
Despite clear preference for the British and French cause expressed almost daily by some, though not all, members of the US administration, and in American newspapers, the US government, for reasons that are now not easy to understand, expected Germany to honour American unilaterally declared neutrality. The Wilson administration was incensed when Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare, and its anger made it inevitable that the USA would enter the war, despite Woodrow Wilson's avowed intention to keep his country out of it.
After the Great War, public opinion in the USA could not forget that the US involvement in the conflict had been the result of political mismanagement (from the isolationist standpoint). There was great pressure on Congress progressively to define in far greater detail than hitherto the nature of US neutrality. In 1935, Congress enacted a law which authorised the President to prevent the shipment of arms and prohibit US citizens from travelling on foreign ships, except at their own risk. As the European political situation drifted towards war, and the US became nervous of the alliance between Japan and Germany, a Neutrality Act of November 1939 repealed the arms embargo element of the earlier legislation and instituted what became known as the "cash and carry" arms system, designed to help friendly nations who were attacked by the tyrannies of Europe while keeping American out of the battle.
The USA was now beginning to show signs of the same philosophy that had caused the problems in 1916: the wish to help one side in a war while remaining neutral. Despite protests from midwestern isolationists and right wing senators, America began to sell arms to Britain and France. By so doing, Roosevelt made American neutrality wholly dependent upon the Axis powers' acceptance of the principle that a neutral power had the right to sell arms to Axis enemies. Clearly, it was a position that was tenable only for as long as Hitler and his Axis allies wished it to be.
By the time Nazi Germany had taken Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France, Roosevelt was advising the American nation to "have done with fears and illusion". In the year following the May 1940 German invasion of North West Europe, Congress appropriated $37,000,000,000, more than the total US expenditure on the Great War, for rearmament and aid to the Allies.
Public opinion in the USA was sharply divided. On the one hand William Allen White's Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies urged that the USA should become Britain's non-belligerent ally. On the other, the America First Committee, whose policy was one of pacifism, isolationism, anti-Semitism and dislike of almost anything British gained the strong support of many public figures, including Charles A. Lindbergh. Because Germany and Russia were signatories to a Non-aggression Pact, following the August 1939 agreement, pro-Nazis and pro-Communists joined in an unlikely alliance to keep the USA out of the war.