COURTING A RELUCTANT ALLY - National Intelligence University

Chapter 6COURTING THE RELUCTANT ALLYJUNE 1940-MARCH 1941From the standpoint of naval policy-making in the external field, the 27months of World War II before Pearl Harbor rank in significance with thesucceeding 45 months during which the United States was a formal belligerent.By the time of the Japanese sneak attack, the major pattern ofstrategic effort had already been hammered out in close conjunction withthe British.Robert Greenhalgh Albion, Makers of naval policy, 1798-1947British ManeuversFrom the summer of 1940 through the spring of 1941, secret development ofthe cooperative relationship between America and Great Britain took place onmany levels. While the leadership of the U.S. and its navy were predisposed toaid the British, this predisposition was based on a realistic appraisal of U.S.national interests rather than on favoritism. Mutual distrust was a factor bothcountries would need to contend with and, despite the many channels of communicationthat developed between the two countries, attitudes and assumptionswould continue to bring miscues that resulted in numerous faltering steps towardalliance. Still, by March 1941, with the completion of the American-British-Canadian Staff Talks (ABC-1), the U.S. and the UK had essentially completedtheir strategic rapprochement. By then, the depth and breadth of intelligenceexchange occurring between the two countries were several times greater thananything either country would have envisioned when the war began in September1939. With but one important exception, all of the major forums designed toimprove cooperation between the two countries were the result of British initiatives.Many of the initiatives occurred concurrently.William Stephenson and British Security CoordinationEven as many of the initiatives the British took to entice America into cooperatingwith their war effort were overt, one long-running covert componentactively attempted to influence U.S. decisionmakers into entering the war on theside of Great Britain. Much of this story has been told elsewhere. A complete,although unofficial, accounting of British overt and covert intelligence activitiesin America, written just after the war by members of the British Security Coordi-57