Threshold of War by Heinrichs Waldo;

Author:Heinrichs, Waldo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1988-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

August-September Crossing the Threshold

At New London on Monday, August 4, President Roosevelt boarded the yacht Potomac ostensibly for a cruise along the New England coast, but after a day of well-publicized boating and fishing in Buzzards Bay he slipped into nearby Vineyard Sound to rendezvous with Admiral King’s flagship Augusta. Early the next morning he boarded the heavy cruiser, which, with another heavy cruiser and five destroyers, immediately departed for Newfoundland. Steaming at high speed in spite of fog, the task force arrived at Argentia on August 7, one day before Churchill’s earliest possible arrival in the Prince of Wales and two days before the scarred British battleship entered the bay.1 Though the American Lend-Lease base was on British territory, Roosevelt was determined to welcome the prime minister to North America.

During the trip and the wait, the president received radio messages corroborating news accounts of the German slow-down in Russia. Welles arrived by air on August 8 with the latest intelligence. Dispatches indicated that the cool and skeptical attitude maintained by the embassy at Moscow was changing. On August 2 it had reported that the German drive had halted or slowed and that the Russians were manifesting “definite optimism.” Three days later it judged that “determined and courageous Soviet resistance” as well as the need for resupply had brought a respite, which the Soviets were likely to put to good use and further delay the German advance. Such a delay, the embassy concluded, would have a vital bearing on the “ability of the Soviet armies effectively to engage the bulk of the German armies until the advent of winter” and if necessary to withdraw eastward while continuing to fight.2

The embassy at Berlin sounded an even more positive note. Heavy as Soviet battle losses appeared to be, it reported August 2, the “stopping even temporarily of the German offensive” more than compensated for them. On August 6 the embassy conveyed information from a source it considered reliable that Hitler had turned over the Russian campaign to the high command and left for Obersalzburg to plan future operations. The German schedule for defeat of the Red Army by August 15 and occupation of European Russia by September 30, it was said, had been modified “owing to unforeseen stubborn Soviet resistance.” Especially disturbing had been the discovery of a second Soviet defense line of more than 100 fresh Soviet divisions east of the so-called Stalin Line. Now the Germans aimed for the line of the Volga by winter, still a vast ambition but short of victory. German propaganda, the embassy reported on August 7, had been counteracting public uneasiness over the “unexpected difficulty” of the eastern campaign and the prospect “which has only recently been widely realized within Germany that the war as a whole will go into another winter.” On the basis of this sort of information, British intelligence officials were concluding that a German invasion in 1941 now seemed very unlikely and that the German objective in Russia would be consolidation.

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