America and Roosevelt

• Main Author: Best, Geoffrey
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York, NY 2003
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195161397.003.0017; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/53078184/isbn-9780195161397-book-part-17.pdf

Abstract Momentous decisions about strategy and foreign relations had to be made within a few weeks of Churchill’s assumption of the national leadership. Britain’s military situation quickly became as unfavourable as could have been imagined. Germany’s swift defeat of France, close on the heels of the occupation of Denmark, Norway and the Low Countries, meant more than the loss of Britain’s only major ally; an ally moreover who had been relied on to provide the greater part of the land forces with which Germany was to be fought. It meant that the German armed forces were also far better placed for operations against the British Isles. U-boats could sail straight into the high seas from bases on the Atlantic coast of France instead of having to creep through the Straits of Dover or go the long way round between Scotland and Iceland. Bombers operating from bases in France, Belgium and Norway could reach every desirable British target and bring heavier loads of bombs with them. Warships and commerce raiders had the whole Norwegian coastline to operate from, and the French ports too if they could get there. Germany’s war-making potential was increased by control of the economies of the occupied countries (Czechoslovakia’s of course was already in the bag), and the traditional British idea of blockading a continental foe into submission was gone forever. All that was catastrophic enough, yet there was even worse to come. Italy entered the war on 10 June 1940. Its incursion into south-eastern France was of little significance, but it mattered much that British security in East Africa, Egypt and the Middle East generally was now threatened. It mattered also that the Mediterranean had suddenly changed from being a safe sea into a perilous one. One of the nightmares of the pre-war imperial security planners had become a reality: the Royal Navy had to fight in the Mediterranean, on its own, as well as in the Atlantic and everywhere else.