f reedom of a ction 143and his military advisors, who had regarded the French army as the
fi nest in the world. More than that, French defeat and British evacu-
ation at Dunkirk swept away the foundation of Roosevelt’s initial
wartime grand strategy: no longer could the United States assume that
its role would be limited to supplying the Allied armies as they checked
Hitler on the European continent. During summer and fall 1940, as the
fate of England hung in the balance, the administration debated
whether it made sense to ship additional scarce American war supplies
to the British. Th e president’s military advisors warned that American
forces were dangerously short of weapons and equipment for a last-
ditch defense of the Western Hemisphere in the event of a Nazi attack.
Fortunately, the British under Winston Churchill’s determined lead-
ership stoutly resisted German air attacks over the second half of 1940,
while British and Commonwealth forces won victories over the Italians
in the Middle East. Reassured that the British Empire would continue
to fi ght, then, Roosevelt resolved to support it at all costs. But this
decision necessarily implied others that would push the president down
a path from which there could be no turning back. By late 1940,
Churchill informed the president that Great Britain was running out of
the money needed to pay for war orders. Just as important, the Royal
Navy faced a rising menace from U-boat attacks, much like 1917, and it
would do little good if American supplies could not be delivered to the
war zone.
Th e crisis provoked by the German triumph in Western Europe in
spring 1940 spilled over to the Far East. Western defenses against
Japanese southward expansion had always been fragile, more bluff than
substance. Still, the combined Asian forces of Great Britain (positioned
in India, Burma, Malaya, and, above all, Singapore), France (in Indo-
china), the Netherlands (in the East Indies), and the United States (in
the Philippines) should have sufficed to deter Japanese aggression.
Japan also had to anticipate that its potential regional adversaries would
receive major reinforcements from their homelands. With the defeat of
France and the Netherlands, though, their colonial outposts could
expect no help. Japanese expansionists recognized the vulnerability and,
with no objection from the new Vichy regime, sent troops into northern
Indochina to close off one supply route to the Chinese Nationalists.
Great Britain meanwhile needed all its military resources to forestall