Alas all that missing Marmite
A news flash from Jonathan Gallant:
President Trump has issued an executive order, cancelling the name of the FDR Drive along the east side of Manhattan in New York City. Asserting that FDR deserves no special recognition for leading the USA through World War II, President Trump asserted that there wouldn’t have been a world war at all if he had been president. “The Poles just brought it all on themselves when they provoked Germany by signing a military alliance with Britain,” he said. “Poland could have made a deal with Herr Hitler, by turning over Danzig and the Polish Corridor to him, and then there wouldn’t have been any war.”
President Trump added that FDR’s administration had prolonged the war by sending Lend-Lease military aid to Britain after hostilities broke out. He added that it was stupid to provide all that support without its being secured by the promise of US property rights to key British resources, such as Cornish tin, Welsh slate, and Marmite.
I have no idea who Jonathan Gallant is, but this is pure genius!
Actually, Lend-Lease was not free. For England every asset they had in the USA had to be sold, often at below market value, before Lend-Lease would be provided. And post-war there would be (and were) restrictions on items that could be made in England and imported into the USA. These were the reasons Canada would not acept Lend-Lease directly, and in fact became a provider of material (under the uninspiring name of Canadian Mutual Aid), to a total of 10% of the US program, but without the post-war market restrictions to Allies.
How greedy and repulsive of us – trumpy from the outset.
I think I knew that about the ruthless price for Lend-Lease once upon a time but I forget everything. Thanks for the note!
Harald, Jon has several guest posts here.
Ah, I am bad with names. Really bad. Plus, I don’t follow your blog as closely as it deserves.
I don’t expect you (or anyone) to remember everything here! (I don’t remember everything here so why should anyone else?) I was just informing, not implying “as you should already know”.
My father was a merchant seaman on the unarmed trans Atlantic convoys. The ships were Lend Lease. He told me they were so poorly built they could roll in a dry dock.
Still, they did their job.
Multiply is one of those annoying words which is spelt the same way for two or more meanings with different pronunciations.
I read it as ‘mull-tip-ligh’ at first, as in arithmetic, and only when I realised that it doesn’t make sense did my brain register it as ‘mull-tip-lee’, which does.
I think you meant that for the post about Trump?
Rev David @ 6 – really?! How interesting. That was such a crucial job, and so risky. Undersung heroes kind of thing.
I knew he had been a Merchant Seaman, and he often told me tales of being at sea as I was a wee bairn. But I didn’t know about the Atlantic convoys he was on until much later in life, after he had retired. My mother began it by writing and stirring for years to get him his “MN Merchant Navy” Badge which I now hold as they have both died.
One of his ships was SS Samalness, built in just 56 days!
The Cruel Sea.
Hey Rev., your dad and mine might have shared the same ocean on a convoy or two! My dad served in the Royal Canadian Navy on Flower Class corvettes* (Dunvegan and Eyebright) that escorted convoys across the Atlantic. He was 17 when the war broke out, and joined up in 1940 (I think). I don’t think he ever saw any combat, but even so, there was always risk and danger. Ironically, his life was saved a couple of times by tardy paperwork. He was bumped from the ship he was initially assigned to, Windflower when there was a mix-up in the necessary documents. On December 7, 1941, Windflower was struck by one of the ships she was escorting, taking 23 crewmen with her, including the man who had taken dad’s place. In October the following year, a delayed paycheck prevented dad from making it to join a family which had invited him to Newfoundland for Thanksgiving. The ship he would have taken, a ferry called the SS Caribou, was torpedoed by a U-boat, resulting in the deaths of 136 of the 237 people on board. I think that these close calls gave him an acceptance of death that he might not otherwise have had. In the end it was a race between emphysema and skin cancer, both likely legacies of his wartime service, the former through the smoking habit he picked up, and the latter from all the sunshine on the seas.
Dad was discharged from the Navy in 1944 when a depth charge set for minimum depth went over the side of his ship, exloding near the surface and rupturing one of his eardrums. He had been trained as a radar operator, and after he left the Navy, he was visited by the RCMP, who thought he should put his training to better use in the continuing war effort. Dad declined; he’d done his bit and he was out for good.
Dad’s eyes would always light up when he told his stories, but he usually didn’t volunteer them. He never went to sea again.
*Monsarrat’s fictional Compass Rose was a Flower Class Corvette. They were very “lively” ships; it was said of them that “they would roll in wet grass.” They were quick and easy to build, and hundreds of them were. Churchill called them “cheap and nasties”. They were cheap to build, and nasty to the enemy. They weren’t a picnic for the men serving on them either. Originally intended for in-shore and coastal duty, they were pressed into trans-Atlantic convoy escort service out of desperation. The initial design, not built with mid-ocean conditions in mind, would ship a lot of green water in heavy seas, with the short foc’sle (“forecastle”) offering little protection or comfort for the crew in rough weather. (One account I’ve read had an American seaman half-jokingly marvelling at the fact that the men serving on Corvettes didn’t get submarine pay, given how much time the little ships spent under water as they buried their bows in the waves.) Being small ships, if they were torpedoed, or struck a mine, they tended to sink quickly, with boiler explosions and detonating depth-charges adding more to the casualty figures than a “simple” sinking would cause.
Of the hundreds of Flower Class Corvettes built, only one remains; HMCS Sackville, Canada’s official Naval Memorial, berthed in Halifax, Nova Scotia. https://www.cnmt.ca/
I watched the first 20 minutes or so of the film of The Cruel Sea last night, possibly while you were writing this, and it was one burial of the bow under the waves after another. The viewer gets the message: it was utterly hellish.
My Dad joined the RCAF in WWII so his experience on the Atlantic was on a troop ship going to Britain. He said he didn’t get sea sick, but sharing a ship with lots of other who did, was unpleasant to put it mildly.
So after the war when he had the opportunity to help fly a bomber home to Canada he was glad to do that rather than take a ship. The plane island-hopped via Iceland with the option of stopping at the Faeroe Islands or Greenland if there was bad weather at the other stopping points. I guess a bomber could be fairly easily converted to some peaceful use once in Canada.