Beaverbrook lunched with us. I hadn’t seen him since that memorable lunch in the embassy in early July. Since then he has managed to make two trips to America and, as ever, was full of news, primarily from overseas. His most interesting revelation was that, in Beaverbrook’s words, Roosevelt is quite definite in his support of war and the participation of the USA in the war on the side of the ‘Allies’, because he believes that ‘fascism’ must be crushed once and for all. Of course, the isolationist sentiments of the American masses hinder the realization of Roosevelt’s intentions, but he will still do everything in his power to help Britain and France win the war. Under certain conditions (if, for instance, the Germans attacked Holland and Belgium) Roosevelt could even draw the United States into the war.

[While making his unauthorized overtures to his former allies in Britain, Maisky toiled hard to reconcile Molotov. In a tedious eight-page report, he addressed the crucial issue of whether England was heading towards war or peace. Having been reprimanded in a letter from Molotov of 11 November, Maisky reassured him that the present observations were based only on those politicians who counted. He portrayed Chamberlain as being firmly in the saddle, having successfully created a ‘united national front’ and having mobilized the Empire. In foreign policy, Chamberlain had been successful in isolating Hitler, now that the ‘anti-Comintern pact’ had lost its meaning, while the pact with the Turks had reconciled Britain with the Muslim world. On the whole, the position of British foreign policy had been ‘significantly enhanced during the first three months of the war’. Contradicting what he entered in his diary, he wrote to Molotov that he believed Chamberlain would ‘emerge victorious’ over the Churchill group and would seek to end the war through a dignified compromise. In the same breath he warned that Chamberlain’s policy remained hostile to the Soviet Union and ‘at the end of the day he might somehow succeed in diverting Hitler to the east’.

DVP, 1939, XXII/2, doc. 806, 23 Nov. 1939.

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