740.0011 European War 1939/545: Telegram
The Ambassador in the United Kingdom (Kennedy) to the Secretary of State
[Received 8:25 p.m.]
1800. Personal for the Secretary. I saw Halifax.82 He says he feels better than he has for quite a few weeks past for two reasons.
First, the preliminary reports he has received from the Turks and others on the Russian situation indicate that Mr. Hitler perhaps did not get as good a bargain as he thought he was getting in making his nonaggression pact with the Russians; that it is very apparent too that the Germans are receiving a very nice doublecross for themselves. He expects to have further information when the Turkish group from Moscow return and he will let me know at once. The second encouraging factor is that General Ironside told him this morning that all the reports from the representatives arriving back here from Poland indicate that the primary cause of the collapse of Poland was that the communication system broke down completely due to inefficiency, but that when the Poles had a chance to meet the Germans on any equitable basis at all the Poles unquestionably won the decision. All the staff officers who were in the last war said there is no comparison between the morale of the present German fighting forces and the morale of the Germans in 14 to 18. The present morale is definitely bad. I asked him if this were another case of wishful thinking and he said definitely not; that it was a cold-blooded report from Ironside.
I asked him if he did not think the British were in a difficult place to continue promising to restore Poland to its rightful owners at a later date, now that Stalin had come into the picture and he said definitely they realized it was a very serious problem; in fact he had spent 2 hours alone with the Prime Minister on Saturday night discussing just this problem. I would be very much surprised if Britain’s war aims for the future were not put on a high idealistic plane with very general and less particular specifications as to what is going to be done for Poland.
[Page 454]I said to him, “Suppose Hitler said to you, ‘All right, I want to be an artist and I will withdraw and Goering83 and the decent people will run Germany; what will you, Mr. British, say now to the Poles?’”. Halifax said he realized they would be in a very difficult position if anything like that should happen.
My own impression is that they have no intention of fighting in the first place and that they regard the situation as changing so very fast that they do not know where the next move will be. He has high hopes that the German people will gradually become disgusted with the whole situation and that at some point, he does not know whether it will be shortly or a long time off, the German Army will take command. That the British would be perfectly willing to see this happen and I think they feel that they could do business with the army. They have worked themselves up without much difficulty into believing this is a war to eliminate Hitler, but every time they get set to take a firm position, as in the Polish affairs, the picture is so kaleidoscopic that they have to take another point of view.
I asked Halifax, “Supposing the Germans arrive at a bad state of affairs what makes you believe that any group of people can handle them from now on and, since they have Mr. Stalin as their next door neighbor, might not the country go Bolshevik and a Communist Europe result?” His only answer to that was that he had spent 2 hours talking to the Prime Minister about this but that the picture is changing so rapidly it is not safe to make any predictions on what might happen. This is not a very satisfactory answer, but I do not know what else he could say.
As far as the Italians are concerned, he does not believe that they will come in on the side of England; certainly not from present indications, but something may happen in the future that might change this. He said they have been very helpful on most everything put up to them. The Germans had asked them about changing the flag of a great many of the German ships to that of Italy and the British told the Italians they could not stand for that and the Italians refused to go through for the Germans on it.
He said Churchill84 reported to the War Cabinet this morning that to his best knowledge and belief instead of the Germans having 50 to 60 submarines they had 70, of which the British had destroyed 7 in the first 3 weeks of the war. This encourages them very much indeed. He said, however, that the Germans have now started to build smaller submarines which, of course, will not have the cruising radius but will be able to do considerable damage. They have not yet received authoritative information as to how fast they are being [Page 455] built. He said the British had captured some 60,000 tons of contraband headed for Germany more than they had lost on the ships sunk. I have no way of knowing whether these figures are accurate because Halifax said to the best of his memory these were the figures. I am sure he was trying to give them to me accurately but they sounded so much greater than I would have thought possible that I am wondering about them.
I would judge that the tone of the propaganda to emanate from England from here on is to be along the lines that the great, lumbering British Government is working up speed along all its different fronts and in all its different colonies and dominions to where they will deliver the big smash when it becomes absolutely necessary.