Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II by Bill Yenne Read Free Book Online

called Lend-Lease. The idea was that the United States would “sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend, or otherwise dispose of” weapons and materiel to any government whose defense the president deemed vital to the defense of the United States. The way it worked was the United States government purchased the weapons from the manufacturers and then delivered them to the Allies.
    Payment for the Lend-Lease goods, or their return to the United States, was to be made after the war. In fact, few of the goods that survived the war were actually returned, and repayment was delayed. Britain finally settled up its bill, at a deeply discounted rate, at the end of 2006.
    On the covert side, American officers had already met secretly with British and Canadian military leaders between January and March in the “ABC-1” (First American-British-Canadian) staff conferences to discuss strategy for “if” the United States entered the war against Germany. Indeed, elements of the ABC-1 plan had been incorporated into AWPD-1, specifically the part about the implementation of a joint Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign against Germany.
    The seeds of a wartime working relationship had sprouted earlier, in August 1941, when Roosevelt and Churchill themselves met at sea off Newfoundland to announce an optomistic postwar cooperative agreement, which came to be known as the Atlantic Charter. The Arcadia Conference in Washington that winter was both a confirmation of previously understood cooperation, and a nuts-and-bolts planning session for specificcollaboration toward what should be and
could be
done next—now that the two parties had become wartime allies.
    In the dark days of December, what
could be
done next was summarized as not much. What
would be
done next was up to the British and American officers who knew they faced an uphill climb.
    In the Pacific, in the previous two weeks, the Japanese had used airpower to decimate the United States Pacific Fleet and sink two of Britain’s biggest warships. They had landed in the Philippines and were headed for Manila, washing over American and Filipino defenders with ease—and with air superiority. While the Arcadia conferees were in the midst of their talks, the Japanese captured the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, even as the Germans were banging on Moscow’s door.
    With 20/20 hindsight, we know that the German failure to capture the Soviet capital in December 1941 was a watershed moment, but at the time, the only hindsight available told the planners that since their invasion of the Soviet Union six months earlier, the Germans had captured more territory faster than any army in history. In addition to dominating virtually all of continental Europe, they occupied an area of the Soviet Union more than twice as large as Germany itself.
    At their historic December meeting, the American and British leaders created a “Combined Chiefs of Staff” (CCS) to direct the war effort, and they decided on a strategy. They decided to put their principal military efforts in the war against Germany, while attempting to contain the Japanese offensive.
    They knew that one day, they would have to fight a major land battle against the German Army that had defeated France in a couple of weeks and
appeared
to have defeated the Soviet Union in a few months.
    There was not an American in the room who did not get a nervous lump in his throat when he thought of having to fight the blitzkrieg. The British knew that their expeditionary force
had
fought the blitzkrieg in France in 1940—and they barely escaped with their lives. In the meantime, the Germans were turning the continent into their
Festung Europa
(“Fortress Europe”), fortifying the coastline opposite Britain into an impregnable citadel.
    Though the failure of the Germans to capture Moscow in Decemberwas touted by the Soviets as a great victory, the Arcadia conferees interpreted it merely as a minor setback for an army that had thus far