Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-1944.

• Author: DOENECKE, JUSTUS D.
• Position: Review

Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-1944 By Thomas E. Mahl Washington, D.C.: Brassey's, 1998. Pp. xiv, 257. $26.95.

From 1939 to 1941, Americans engaged in one of the bitterest debates in their history: whether or not to aid Britain at the risk of entering World War II. Seldom had the nation been so divided. Each step taken by the Roosevelt administration brought the United States closer to war: repeal of the arms embargo in 1939, the destroyers-for-bases deal in 1940, and a host of moves in 1941, including the Lend-Lease Act, the occupation of Greenland and Iceland, the presidential order to shoot German submarines "on sight," the arming of merchant vessels, and the removal of the ban of entry into Allied ports. Although the United States became a full-scale belligerent only with Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and Germany's declaration of war, it had long been involved in an undeclared conflict.

The president's foes argued, as did a school of postwar historians known as revisionists, that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had never leveled with the public concerning the obvious implications of his proposals. Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce put the issue most succinctly: FDR "lied us into a war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it." Besides, so they claimed, the president was placing the interest of another nation, Great Britain, ahead of his own.

"Isolationists," as Roosevelt's opponents were simplistically and inaccurately called, always insisted that the besieged British were manipulating American policy to their advantage. The pundit H. L. Mencken accused the United States of "acting precisely like a British colony." The New York Daily News proclaimed America "unofficially part of the British Empire."

Certainly, from the time the great debate of 1939-1941 was launched, Anti-interventionists publicized the fact that their leading foes often belonged to an Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite. With many members living in the Northeast and having been educated at Ivy League schools, that elite possessed extensive ties to Britain, practically honoring it as the "mother country." When, for example, Sarah Delano Roosevelt, the mother of Franklin, greeted the king and queen of England at Hyde Park in 1939, she welcomed them with the words, "We are cousins." In her published diaries, Anne Morrow Lindbergh expressed irritation at "the smart women wearing British lions conspicuously on their...