In making a broader judgement about Anglo-American relations, it seems useful to think carefully about just what allies are. It is unheard-of in history for two sovereign nations to achieve concord across the whole range of policy. Countries become allies because they discover one, and occasionally a few more, objectives in common. Almost always, this includes a shared enemy. Marlborough in the 18th Century led British and Dutch forces against the French, as did Wellington British, Spanish and Portuguese troops a hundred years later. Such relationships have always been highly fractious.
I am a student of the Second World War. The extravagant rhetoric of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill about the Grand Alliance causes some historians even to this day wildly to overstate the harmony and intimacy of their relationship. They are sometimes described as friends. This seems mistaken: they created a friendship of state, something quite different. By 1944-45 the British, and Churchill in particular, had become privately angry and bitter at what they perceived as intolerably overbearing American behaviour towards themselves. I will quote an example of just how tough Washington could be.
In December 1944, there was hunger verging upon starvation in Italy and indeed all Europe. A British embassy official in Washington visited Assistant Secretary of War John J.McCloy to protest against the policy of monopolising precious shipping to transport fantastically extravagant quantities of supplies to US forces overseas, while liberated civilians were in desperate straits. ‘In order to win the war’, the British visitor demanded of McCloy, ‘were we not imperilling the political and social fabric of European civilization on which the future peace of the world depended ? His subsequent memo to the Foreign Office records: ‘This drew from Mr.McCloy the immediate rejoinder that it was a British interest to remember that, as a result of the complete change in the economic and financial position of the British Commonwealth which the war had brought about, we, in the U.K., depended at least as much upon the U.S. as we did upon Europe. Was it wise to risk losing the support of the U.S. in seeking the support of Western Europe ? This was what was involved’.
The shocked British official persisted in pressing the case for feeding Europe’s civilians. McCloy, too, stuck to his guns. He asserted that it would be fatal for Britain ‘to argue that the war in the Pacific should be retarded in order that the civilian population of Europe should be fed’. The Foreign Office in London professed acute dismay on reading the record of this meeting. But British impotence in the face of U.S.dominance remained inescapable.
That is only one example of the sort of exchanges which took place between the two allied capitals in the latter part of the war, supposedly a halcyon era of Anglo-American relations. The Americans were in the driving seat. They knew it, and were determined to impose their will. Brigadier Vivian Dykes of the British Military Mission in Washington wrote home: ‘We simply hold no cards at all, but London expects us to work miracles. It is a hard life’. Curiously enough, at that time the US adopted a more indulgent attitude to the third party in the alliance, the Soviet Union. Until his death, Roosevelt harboured delusions about the working relationship that might be possible with Stalin, such as Churchill abandoned years earlier.
One reason Stalin became the most successful warlord of World War II was that he understood with icy clarity something that often eluded the Americans and British. The three allied powers were conjoined to defeat the common enemy of Nazism; but this in no way altered the fact that on almost everything else, their purposes were at odds. This applied also, if in lesser degree, between Britain and the US. In 1940-41, before America became a belligerent, Washington insisted on payment of cash on the nail for every ton of arms and supplies shipped across the Atlantic, until the British had exhausted their entire gold holdings and foreign investment portfolio, some of which had to be sold to US companies at firesale prices. Churchill was appalled by this, and wrote to Roosevelt on 7 December 1940, saying that if the cash drain continued, his nation would find itself in a position in which ‘after the victory was won with our blood and sweat, and civilization saved and the time gained for the US 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’.