Blaming the British

I

IF I were employed by Hitler or Hirohito as an agent in America, I should spend my time damning and baiting the British. I should do what many of the American dupes of the Axis — conscious and unconscious — are already doing. I should say, or cause it to be said, that the British are treacherous, stupid, arrogant, selfish, blundering, and even cowardly; that they are the architects of our woes; the people who dragged us into a war that is no concern of ours, and who will eventually drag us down to defeat with them. Nothing could be more disastrous to our cause or more helpful to our enemies. Yet these things are now being said and written in the United States. Moreover, as it is likely that the war will continue to go against the United Nations for some time, the volume and shrillness of such anti-British pronouncements may be expected to increase. They will come in part from well-meaning but frustrated Americans in search of a scapegoat upon whom to place the blame for our own defeats and shortcomings. But they will come in larger measure from unreconstructed isolationists, hardened appeasers, last-ditch fascists, and those who hate Roosevelt more than they love their country. They dare not state their aims openly, but they may project them covertly and safely by baiting Britain.

In the Congress, for example, Representative Hoffman of Michigan told the country on January 27, 1942, that it is Britain’s policy to save the British while the devil may take the Americans. ‘England,’ he said, ‘has been taking care of herself, and she and Australia are now asking us to save them while our own fighting men are dying on our own soil.’ This is a repetition of the old but apparently ever-effective ‘perfidious Albion’ story. The Nazis used it with brilliant success as part of their plan to defeat the French by setting them against the British — ‘England will fight to the last Frenchman.’ Mr. Hoffman, however, is not content to denounce merely Britain — that is the province of little men. He condemns her and all of her (our) allies except the Dutch.

When he sat down his colleague, Representative Shafer of Michigan, arose. Trembling with indignation, he seemed about to denounce the barbarities of the Nazi and the Jap. But not at all. British treachery had kindled the flame of his awful anger. The British, he told the House, are as treacherous as the Japanese since there is no distinction between their attack upon the French fleet at Oran and the Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor. What is the totality of these statements by the Michigan Congressmen? It is that we are fighting to save the British Empire — a story whose bearded venerability must bring it some measure of respect even if its whiskers are palpably false. It is, further, that the British are treacherous — ‘perfidious Albion’ again. But the new twist is that, even if we survive the treachery of the British, we shall play second fiddle after the war to a lot of Russians, Chinese, Hottentots, and Indians. Therefore, reads the unstated conclusion, if we had any sense, if we were patriotic Americans, we would make peace now and let the scum of the earth fend for themselves.

Outside Congress, and sometimes from unexpected sources, the attack on the British scales the peaks of vituperation and hysteria. Here is Samuel Grafton, columnist of the New York Post, interventionist, and anti-fascist, who assails what he calls the ‘Conservative Party hacks’ in Great Britain, and at the same time reads a lesson to the Admiralty in a politico-military polemic which indicates that the writer is capable of running the British Government with one hand without letting it know that the other is running the British Navy. If the Admiralty had any brains, he says, it would not have bombed the German battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst one hundred and ten times at Brest. According to this salt-encrusted columnist, it is nonsense to bomb battleships piecemeal; he would have sunk them at once in an ‘all-out attack on the Nazi ships.’ This of course never occurred to the Admiralty, and now it is too late for it to adopt Horatio Nelson Grafton’s suggestion, since his column did not appear until the ships had escaped to Helgoland. What makes the British so stupid? asks this authority as he leaves the shell-torn quarterdeck for his desk. It is, he answers, that ‘their approach to the war has always been domestic and cozy.’ One understands from this that aggressiveness and tenacity are no longer British qualities but are mere words that lie cold and clammy amid their tea things, while the war to this quaint people is a mildly interesting phenomenon far less arresting than an unexplainable crocus springing up in winter on Golder’s Green.

In his bluewater rage, Mr. Grafton does not say that British bombings kept two 26,000-ton German ships immobile for a year. And when they escaped, he has no words of admiration for the dash and courage of destroyer commanders who drove within two thousand yards of the giant German guns before releasing their torpedoes. He is unable even to summon up a trace of compassion for two hundred or more young Englishmen who died in forty-two planes as they flew their craft into a hell of gunfire and blinding snow and the leaden hail of constantly renewed squadrons of German fighters.

So much for thunder on the left. Let us now hear it on the right. Mr. Grafton, the interventionist, must be surprised to find himself ranged alongside Mr. William Randolph Hearst, the isolationist, as that lifelong warrior for beauty and truth opens up from his ink-splattered trench at San Simeon. Never one to attack an enemy piecemeal — thereby differing sharply from the British Admiralty — Mr. Hearst first demands nothing less than the resignation of Mr. Churchill. Granted that this demand, coming from an American, is not without impudence; granted further that Mr. Hearst might become pro-British if the English press demanded the resignation of Mr. Roosevelt, one can still imagine what would happen here if the English press should make such a demand. This, however, is but a beginning. Mr. Hearst sees the war as a conflict between the White Races and the Yellow Races and says so in a paragraph that Dr. Goebbels might envy: —

‘What is vital to the British Empire and to America and to all the Occidental nations is the renascence of Asia, the revolt and reunion of the Eastern nations, the release of the unleashed Yellow Peril, and the mighty menace that arises . . . from the Orient to threaten the white man’s leadership in the progress and possession of the world.’ (Italics mine)

In Mr. Hearst’s view, since Japan is a menace to ‘all the Occidental nations,’ she is consequently an enemy of Germany and Italy as much as she is an enemy of Great Britain and the United States. It is she who is to be feared and not Hitler and Mussolini, who — presumably — are not out to destroy the democracies at all but are merely indulging in a rather elephantine practical joke at their expense. It appears that Japan is our sole enemy — and the Chinese also, since they are yellowskinned Asiastics.

The rise of the Yellow Peril is, of course, the fault of the British led by Mr. Churchill, who is, says Mr. Hearst, a man so blind that he ‘apparently cannot see beyond the illumination of his everpresent cigar.’ Yet, although he does not know how to fight a war or exorcise the Yellow Peril, he is nonetheless so diabolically clever that ‘he has succeeded in dragging the United States into England’s entanglements . . . and making the United States the victim of England’s and Churchill’s mistakes and misfortunes.’ Thus the Anglo-American wartime association is one of the blind leading the blind. No matter how stupid Mr. Churchill may be, the American people must be even more stupid since they were dragged into the war by the cigar-besotted Prime Minister.

In other circles, one hears other things. If the British fight well, it is because, of course, they have been supplied with American planes and tanks which inevitably are ‘the best in the world.’ (One wonders how Britons saved themselves in the vast air battles of 1940 after the fall of France when only British weapons, skill, and courage saved them — and ourselves — from destruction.) But when Britain is defeated, even though aided by American machines which are the best in the world, it is because of her stupidity, smugness, and the strangling Old School Tie. So much for the fighting. What of the aftermath? If we struggle through to victory with the inert British strangling our whipcord Yankee necks, we shall have struggled merely to save England’s repulsive, undemocratic caste system, while at the same time there is no doubt that the ingrates will abandon the caste system for socialism and so imperil our political and economic system here in America. They’re clever, those British; they’ll fool you every time.

Summing up the anti-British speeches, writings, and talk in and out of Congress, it appears that we have everything to lose and nothing to gain by fighting the war through to victory. And since the British are treacherous we had better hurry to make the best peace available right now because they may sign up first and leave us holding the bag.

II

These conclusions, of course, are not plainly stated by anti-British writers and speakers, but the implications may be read by all except the blind. They constitute in their repetition a dangerous onslaught upon Allied unity at a time when unity is inseparable from victory, and when disunity, born of mutual hatred and suspicion, is an essential condition precedent to defeat.

This is not to say that even wellmeaning Americans have no ‘right’ to criticize Britain’s conduct of the war. It is to say that such criticism on our part is superfluous because the British attend to that task exceedingly well, while whatever we may say about them is weak and pale by comparison with what they say about themselves. In this all-important respect they have been, and continue to be, free, civilized, and adult. If you would compile a dictionary of anti-British invective, it would be a mistake to turn to the speeches of Hitler, Mussolini, or American Congressmen when there is available a rich repertoire of searing epithets applied by Britons to Britain.

Even if we were to indulge ourselves recklessly in the heady and dangerous luxury of sniping at the British, fairness would dictate that we first give them credit for what they have done since the beginning of the war long ago in September 1939. First of all, the British saved us from destruction. When France fell in 1940, the British Isles faced with unblinking courage the massed might of the greatest military machine the world has ever known and, defeating it in the air above Britain, saved themselves and gave us precious, indispensable time for arming and awakening. If Britain had fallen in 1940 when we stood weak and unarmed, what American, knowing what he now knows, could deny that we should have been easy prey to the combined power of Germany and Japan?

But if British airmen could not conceive of defeat, neither could British civilians. With steadfast courage they joined their soldiers of the air in gaining the long interval that is essential to their own salvation and ours.

It is well for us to remember that up to December 7, 1941, all our fighting had been done for us by other peoples, especially the British and the Russians. Now we shall have to shoulder a mighty burden. When Americans go Britainbaiting, let them bear in mind that only a few months ago the House came within one vote of beating a bill to extend the Selective Service Act and keep the Army intact. If one vote had gone the other way, we should have had no army at all. Let them recall that we failed to fortify Guam, inadequately fortified the Philippines, and were not alert at Pearl Harbor; that at the Washington Naval Conference of 1922 we almost scuttled the Navy while simultaneously giving control of the Western Pacific to Japan; that, in an economy drive, we did not build a single capital ship for more than ten years and nearly let the Navy perish for lack of men and material; while only yesterday we were torn by the question of trading fifty old destroyers to Britain or selling her goods on a cash-and-carry basis. That was the time, you recall, when the war in Europe was just a squabble that was no concern of ours.

America and Britain are not only the last outposts of liberty left in a bleeding world, but they are, with their allies, the last hope of liberty for all men everywhere. Faced, then, with the supreme task of saving themselves and charged with the hopes of nearly all mankind, it is inconceivable that men of good will on either side should indulge in baiting the other and so imperil all that men have been struggling for during the past two thousand years.