To that end, FDR and Prime Minister Winston Churchill had for some time been exchanging personal correspondence on all sorts of matters, both private and military. In private, he was doing everything possible to join the struggle against Hitler, thus undermining the policy of neutrality that America had espoused since the beginning of the war. The president’s rhetoric was for public consumption only. Speaking to the county in person and via his fireside chats, he said that the United States did not want to send its boys to fight in any European conflict. Roosevelt had been elected twice and was campaigning for an unprecedented third term in the White House. To his disappointment, London resoundingly declined his offers.Īcross the Atlantic Ocean, the United States was officially neutral. He attempted by clandestine means to send peace overtures to the British government. However much Hitler’s generals wanted to invade England, the Führer still harbored wishes for an Anglo-German alliance against the greater enemy, the Soviet Union, and wanted to spare the tiny island the horrors of an invasion. All along the British coast, fortifications were being erected to repel the expected cross-Channel assault. The German general staff was preparing a secret plan, code-named Operation Sea Lion, to invade England. The Nazi dictator’s vision of world domination was now in his grasp, and only Great Britain stood in defiance of Germany. In the previous year Hitler’s troops and tanks had overrun Poland. In that month, France fell to the Nazi blitzkrieg that threatened to overtake the entire continent. Roosevelt’s seventh year in office, Europe was ablaze.
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