ROOSEVELT PROPOSES "LENDING" ARMS. Early in the next congressional session, President Roosevelt will propose a novel method of aiding Britain. While gifts and loans to purchase war materials have been discussed (and denounced), the President’s reportedly opting for something that sounds in-between. As George Bookman in the Washington Post explains it, under this plan "the United States would pay for all future British arms orders, and lease or mortgage the equipment to Great Britain, with a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that England would make repayment in kind after the war." In other words, when the war is over Britain will owe the U.S. a debt not of money, but in goods, and she could pay that debt either by returning the goods she has used, or manufacturing new items to replace goods destroyed in combat. It’s the President’s way of getting around the "silly dollar sign" that Secretary Morgenthau warns will soon prevent the British from obtaining further U.S. war supplies. Administration officials have said for some time that Britain is not in financial shape to buy war aid from us much longer.
It’s a smart step, a thoughtful way to get around Britain’s financial concerns without doing damage to the fragile political consensus that aid to the British is necessary for America’s own defense. It also gets around the necessity to alter the Johnson Act. The isolationists think otherwise, of course. The Chicago Tribune’s Walter Trohan writes a fairly balanced story on the plan in Wednesday’s editions, although the opening paragraph declares sensationally that "the full resources of the United States will be placed at the disposal of Great Britain for the duration of the war against Germany, without one cent of immediate cost to the British empire." A more level-headed newspaper reader, on the other hand, has good reason to doubt the British would denude our own defenses, or that the Administration has given Prime Minister Churchill carte blanche over how U.S. military resources might be deployed.
One other clever aspect of the plan in particular -- it would help a victorious Britain stay afloat financially after the war, by providing a ready-made market for production of British goods.
WHY "AID" HAS BEEN A MISNOMER. Up until the President’s announcement, much of the discussion about aid to Britain centered on loans of various kinds. But that reduces the question of Britain’s survival and the cause of democracy to a penny-pinching argument over whether the British are a good credit risk. James S. Pope in the Louisville Courier-Journal has written one of the best critiques of this narrow, penny-pinching approach, in words reprinted in this week’s issue of Time magazine --
"The phrase of the moment is ‘Aid to England.’ I, for one, am sick of it. Dr. Gallup says practically all Americans favor ‘aid to England.’...Columnists speak learnedly of the ‘aid’ we already are giving Britain. Our President delivers himself of the odd observation that our ‘aid to England’ has reached its peak....In heaven’s high name, how have we aided England? When? Whose sacrifice produced the aid?...We have sold England an indeterminate number of military airplanes. She has paid cash. She has come and got them. We have sold England, I understand, some old rifles and various shipments of ammunition. She paid cash. She came and got them....Finally, in a moment of benign generosity, we traded England some rotting destroyers for some air and naval bases so valuable to our defense that even Mr. Churchill had difficulty justifying the deal to his Parliament."
"We are going to sell her more and more planes, if our factories will just decide to push them fast enough. We are going to sell England practically anything she wants – if we don’t want it first.... And Napoleon called England a nation of shopkeepers! Oh, America, thou valiant, thou strong. Land of freedom. Eternal foe of cruelty and oppression. defender of men’s minds and men’s properties – of men’s ‘rights.’ What an inspiration we are....We are opening our hearts. We are opening our order books....We are in the throes of a pleasant national orgy of ‘aid to England.’ Ain’t it wonderful?"
A WINTER INVASION OF BRITAIN? It’s a real possibility. At least that’s what they’re saying now -- Lord Beaverbrook in a British radio broadcast Tuesday night (as reported in the New York Herald Tribune), and Alf Landon, quoted in an Associated Press dispatch. Speaking from Topeka, Mr. Landon said that while in Washington recently "from reliable official resources I was advised that Hitler plans to start his English invasion in the middle of February." An earlier date makes more sense to me than a later one. It’s not in the Fuehrer’s personality to fulfill widely-held expectations that he would wait until sometime in the spring. Moreover, the element of surprise would by now be indispensable to the success of any invasion plan, given the toughness of British resistance.
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