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Asia, as well as the home islands, Britain was forming between fifty and sixty divisions. “Even if the United States were our ally, instead of our friend and indispensable partner, we should not ask for a large American expeditionary army.” Shipping was the limiting factor. “The decision for 1941 lies upon the seas.” Here Churchill revealed recent shipping losses: over 400,000 tons in the five weeks ending November 3. “The enemy commands the ports all around the northern and western coasts of France. He is increasingly basing his submarines, flying-boats, and combat planes on these ports and on the islands off the French coast. We are denied the use of the ports or territory of Eire in which to organize our coastal patrols by air and sea. In fact, we have now only one effective route of entry to the British Isles, namely, the northern approaches, against which the enemy is increasingly concentrating, reaching ever farther out by U-boat action and long-distance aircraft bombing.” Britain’s battleship strength, even with the King George V and the Prince of Wales coming into action, provided a dangerously small margin of safety.
    Churchill touched on the fields of danger. At any point Vichycould go over to Hitler; if the French Navy were to join the Axis, “the control of West Africa would pass immediately into their hands, with the gravest consequences to our communications between the Northern and Southern Atlantic, and also affecting Dakar and of course thereafter South America.” It seemed clear that in the Far East Japan was thrusting southward through Indochina to Saigon and other naval and air bases, thus threatening Singapore and the Dutch East Indies.
    What did Churchill ask the United States to do? Item by item he laid out his requests: 1. reassertion by the United States of the doctrine of the freedom of the seas, so that American ships could trade with countries against which there was not an effective legal blockade; 2. protection of this lawful trading by American warships (“I think it is improbable that such protection would provoke a declaration of war by Germany upon the United States, though probably sea incidents of a dangerous character would from time to time occur. Herr Hitler has shown himself inclined to avoid the Kaiser’s mistake….His maxim is ‘One at a time’ ”); 3. failing these the gift, loan, or supply of a large number of American warships, especially destroyers, to help maintain the Atlantic route, and extension by the United States Navy of its sea control of the American side of the Atlantic; 4. “good offices” to induce Eire to co-operate on such matters. A shopping list of specific needs followed. Then finance: “The moment approaches when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies….I believe you will agree that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.” Such a course, he said, would not be in the moral or the postwar economic interest of either country.
    “If, as I believe, you are convinced, Mr. President, that the defeat of the Nazi and Fascist tyranny is a matter of high consequence to the people of the United States and to the Western Hemisphere, you will regard this letter not as an appeal for aid, but as a statement of the minimum action necessary to achieve our common purpose.”
BERLIN
    News of Roosevelt’s re-election came to Adolf Hitler in his modern Reichskanzler’s palace on the Wilhelmstrasse. The Führer made no public statement; he allowed no provocative remarks. But twodays later he gave an answer of sorts—to Roosevelt, to Churchill, to all his enemies—in Munich, on the seventeenth anniversary of the