Guido Preparata's website

[David Guyatt]

Further to Mr. Locke's question above, the following is extracted from David Irving's "Churchill's War".

Twice by late 1940 contemporaries had benevolently applied the labelgangster to Mr Churchill. But in a century of gangster statesmen, he and
Roosevelt were not on the same side; they were not playing the same
game; they were not even in the same league. ëI never let my right hand
know what my left hand does,í the president told his treasury secretary as
he settled into his third term. ëI may have one policy for Europe and one
diametrically opposite for North and South America. . . And furthermore,
í he bragged, unwittingly echoing Hitler's words, I am perfectly
willing to mislead and tell untruths if it will help win the war.*


He ran rings around the British and boasted that he was better at it
than President Woodrow Wilson. He regarded Churchill as a pushover, unreliable and tight most of the time. He turned a deaf ear on all of Churchill's pleas. When the P.M. suggested he send American warships to Britain's imperial outpost at Singapore to keep the Japanese in line since he was about to reopen the Burma Road to let supplies into China he got no joy from the White House.


This is not surprising. The survival of the British empire did not figure
high on Roosevelt's priorities. I would rather, said Roosevelt in 1942,
lose New Zealand, Australia or anything else than have the Russians collapse.
A few weeks later he repeated this. England was, he said, an old,
tired power and must take second place to the younger United States,
Russia and China. Later this sly statesman conceded, when there are
four people sitting in at a poker game and three of them are against the
fourth, it is a little hard on the fourth. Vice President Henry Wallace took
this as an admission that Roosevelt, Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek were
ganging up against Mr Churchill.


Franceís humiliating defeat and Britainís threatening bankruptcy gave
Roosevelt the opportunity to clean up these old empires. At Teheran in
1943 he would confide to Joseph Stalin, ëI want to do away with the word
Reich.í He added, ëIn any language.í Stalin liked that. ëNot just the word,í
he said. Roosevelt's policy was to pay out just enough to give the empire
support ñ the kind of support a rope gives a hanging man. When his treasury
secretary confirmed after visiting London in 1944 that Britain was
penniless, the cynical man in the Oval Office would prick up his ears and
snicker. ëI had no idea,í he said. I will go over there and make a couple of
talks and take over the British empire.


This inspired American statesman would pursue his subversion of the
empire throughout the war. He might lead the crusade for democracy, but
he expected the front-line nations to foot the bill. During the Munich crisis,
he had predicted to his cabinet that the United States would be enriched
by any resulting war. Sure enough, gold from the beleaguered nations
had begun to flow in payment for American war materials. The 1939
revision-of-neutrality legislation, which legalised this sale of war goods to
belligerents, and the Johnson Debt-Default Act required that such purchases
be for cash. So the great blood-letting began. Britain donated
£2,078 million of aid to her own minor allies during the war years, but the
United States extorted from her every moveable asset in return for acting
as the Arsenal of Democracy. During the war Britain would sell off
£1,118 million of foreign investments; in addition, her foreign debt would
increase by £2,595 million from 1939 to 1945. Formerly the world's
major creditor, Britain became an international pauper, and even forty
years later she had not permanently recovered.

It continues in a similar vein for several more pages. The point being that Roosevelt, being a politician, was taking credit for the War & Peace Studies Group recommendations.