Abstract
THE BRITISH DECISION TO REFER THE BALTIC QUESTION TO THE AMERICANS reflected the British position of increasing dependence on US assistance in the war effort. This pattern of relations would have a bearing on the Baltic issue for most of the war and beyond. London’s cautious tack with respect to the Americans had its origin in the collapse of the Western front during May–June 1940. As David Reynolds has noted, before that British politicians and officials had viewed the United States with considerable suspicion, fearing that at an eventual peace table they would have to pay too dearly for any help requested. But after May 1940, Chamberlain acknowledged that “our only hope, it seems to me, lies in Roosevelt” and the Chiefs of Staff concluded that “without US help the British could not continue the war with any chance of success.”1
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Notes
David Reynolds describes the year 1940 as the “fulcrum” of the twentieth century, David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 28–32.
The first tangible result of this was the destroyers for bases deal in September, Warren F. Kimball, Forged in War: Churchill, Roosevelt and the Second World War (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 55–8
Reynolds, From World War to Cold War, 53.
Lord Lothian’s remark in the autumn of 1939, cited by Simon J. Rofe, Franklin Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy and the Welles Mission (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 48.
Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929–1969 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 67–87.
Maris A. Mantenieks, “FDR and the Baltic States,” in Thomas C. Howard and William D. Pederson (eds.), Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Formation of the Modern World (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003), 93–121
Natalie Grant, “The Russian Section: A Window on the Soviet Union,” Diplomatic History, vol. 2, issue 1 (1978): Resolution: Global 107–15.
Mary E. Glantz, FDR and the Soviet Union: The President’s Battles over Foreign Policy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005), 11–13, 19, 23, 163–6, 180.
For saving Estonia from typhus, the Estonian Government awarded Henderson with the Freedom Cross; he was also awarded by the Lithuanian and Latvian governments, George W. Baer (ed.), A Question of Trust: The Origins of US—Soviet Diplomatic Relations: The Memoirs of Loy W. Henderson (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 71–80.
Ibid., 1176–80; “Elise’s Baltic background also shaped Henderson’s outlook,” H. W. Brands, Inside the Cold War: Loy Henderson and the Rise of the American Empire, 1918–1961 (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 38; “Oral History Interview with Loy W. Henderson.”
Kari Alenius, “A Baltic Prelude to the Cold War: The United States and the Soviet Annexation of the Baltic States, 1939–1941,” in Olaf Mertelsmann, Kaarel Piirimäe (eds.), The Baltic Sea Region and the Cold War (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2012), 13–14.
Justus D. Doenecke, “The Roosevelt Foreign Policy: An Ambiguous Legacy,” in Justus D. Doenecke and Mark A. Stoler, Debating Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Foreign Policies, 1933–1945 (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 19.
Michael Cassella-Blackburn, The Donkey, the Carrot, and the Club: William C. Bullitt and Soviet-American Relations, 1917–1948 (Westport: Praeger, 2004), 117–76
Beatrice Farnsworth, William C. Bullitt and the Soviet Union (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967).
Dennis J. Dunn, Caught between Roosevelt’s Ambassadors to Moscow (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998).
One of the best intellectual biographies is John Lamberton Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Eduard Mark, “October or Thermidor? Interpretations of Stalinism and the Perception of Soviet Foreign Policy in the United States, 1927–1947,” The American Historical Review, vol. 94, no. 4 (October 1989): 937–62.
Cordell Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1948), I, 807.
Lauri Mälksoo, Illegal Annexation and State Continuity: The Case of the Incorporation of the Baltic States by the USSR; a Study of the Tension between Normativity and Power in International Law (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2003), 104.
According to Flannery, there were altogether 27 meetings with Umanskii, Christopher Flannery, “The Baltic Question and the Foundation of the ‘Grand Alliance’ 1940–1942” (PhD Thesis: Faculty of Claremont Graduate School, 1980), 38
William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937–1940 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1952), 639.
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© 2014 Kaarel Piirimäe
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Piirimäe, K. (2014). The Nonrecognition Policy of the United States, 1940. In: Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Baltic Question. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442345_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137442345_4
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