"Dark Day - did that not also relate to the Lend Lease agreement where all the old ships were released to us poor Brits."
Melvyn:
As with most seminal, historical events of the size and magnitude of WW2, understanding all their multifarious details is immensely complex. Lend Lease is really no different. The best and most enlightening book I've ever seen on the subject just may be Franklin and Winston by John Meacham and ironically its theme is actually the entire chronicle of the personal relationship between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, which was in and of itself immensely complex which perhaps very few realize today!
Lend Lease had many parts and many maneuvers and ramifications too. Of course within the first year of the war in Europe Churchill was completely desperate! He knew he and the British needed Roosevelt and America or they just wouldn't last long against the Nazis.
In my opinion, Churchill really was sort of what the world and the public saw, but Roosevelt----not even close. FDR really was the MASTER political craftsman! He just played Churchill along for about two years telling him one thing and basically just doing another. Roosevelt didn't do it without reason----he had his own political issues to worry about right here in America and the fact was politically he knew at that time America did not want to go to war in Europe again---politically, both in the halls of government and in the main streets of America the sentiment at that time was remarkably isolationist.
Lend Lease was FDR's first and real compromise in what-all HE had to deal with at that time. And probably most don't even understand what kind of a negotiation it was anyway. The US did agree to lend the British a ton of ships and materials but in return America got a whole lot with long term leases and essentially control of British installations all over the world.
You see, ultimately, and as this book does tell in some real detail, the problem between FDR and Churchill (other than a few lingering personal problems from way back around WW1) was that Churchill was not only trying to get Britain to survive the war against the Nazis he was also one of the most active and vocal proponents for the long-term maintenance and endurance of the so-called BRITISH EMPIRE!
FDR clearly did not agree with that or want that in the future and the best he would agree to with Churchill and the rest was some new combination of a British AND AMERICAN global EMPIRE. As history does show FDR definitely won that one and in spades, at least for the next half century or so!
But back to Lend Lease----it was clever indeed, and some of the details of its ramifications may even seem bizarre to us today. My father's second MOS in the US Navy in the war was actually on a REVERSE Lend Lease DE (destroyer escort) in which he crossed the North Atlantic on convoys about ten times. In other words, that DE was British and it was one of those rare ships the British actually leased to the Americans apparently to make the Lend Lease Act seem more like a two way deal. Apparently RDR did it that way to quell the isolationist fervor in America at the time!
But it gets more bizarre with that REVERSE Lend Lease DE my dad first sailed on in his convoy MOS duty which would last him the rest of the war (later he would sail on a couple of more American DEs). When Dad was the gunnery officer on that British DE in the beginning of the war for America his ports of call were Norfolk/Newport News over here and Londonderry Northern Ireland over there. Every time they were in port on both sides the British made the Americans put the entire ship under canopy. Why? Because the British were worried about spies and they did not trust the American security apparatus (basically the FBI because we did not even have the CIA at the time (only a precusor known as the OSS which was actually infiltrated by some British Russian spies, particularly the notorious Kim Philby)).
History of events like that are really complex, Melvyn, and its messy and certainly not as simplistic and cut and dried as perhaps told after the fact in places like Scottish and UK pubs and American bars or even on golf architecture websites!
For God's Sakes, even a man like my father who lived in it and fought in it said he never really knew what-all was going on at any time when it was happening. I used to question him endlessly about it all and he refused to speak about it. Finally in the 1980s towards the end of his life when I wouldn't stop bothering him about it he finally said this to me.
"Tommy, all I knew, and all I thought about, was staying on my feet, staying dry, and staying alive. I couldn't have cared less what Roosevelt, Churchill or even Adolf Hitler was doing or thinking."