George C. Marshall and the Question of Military Aid to England, May-June 1940

In a Foreword to the most recent biography of Harry Hopkins, W. Averell Harriman has put some words into the mouth of Winston Churchill. According to Harriman, if the British Prime Minister had been asked to pick the two Americans, apart from President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who were most responsible for stopping Hitler, he would have replied: 'Among the military, General Marshall, and among the civilians, Harry Hopkins'.' After the war, or even towards the end of it, it is possible maybe likely that Churchill would have said something of the sort; but if the question had been raised at the moment of Britain's darkest peril, June 1940, and if the Prime Minister had been aware of what was being said behind Washington's closed doors in the matter of sending military assistance to the Allies, his comment at least his comment about Marshall would assuredly not have been worthy of repetition in polite company. It is not very well appreciated today that many members of the Roosevelt administration, during the dramatic late spring of 1940, were violently opposed to the policy of draining America of military hardware for the purpose of supplying Britain and (before she fell out of the war in June) France. No top official in Washington was more convinced of the unwisdom of sending increased aid across the Atlantic than the Chief of Staff, George C. Marshall. Yet a surprising 'White Legend' has grown up around Marshall's activities at this critical juncture, in somewhat the same manner that an obnoxious 'Black Legend' swirled about him in the early 1950s, when reactionary Senators Joseph McCarthy and William Jenner sought to smear the record of the then Secretary of

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