ST ANTONY'S/MACMILLAN SERIES General editors: Archie Brown (1978-85) and Rosemary Thorp (1985- ), both Fellows of St Antony's College, Oxford

Roy Allison FINLAND'S RELATIONS WITH THE SOVIET UNION, 1944-84 Said Amir Arjomand (editor) FROM NATIONALISM TO REVOLUTIONARY

ISLAM Anders Åslund PRIVATE ENTERPRISE IN EASTERN EUROPE Orner Bartov THE EASTERN FRONT, 1941-45, GERMAN TROOPS AND

THE BARBARISATION OF WARFARE Gail Lee Bernstein and Haruhiro Fukui (editors) JAPAN AND THE WORLD Archie Brown (editor) POLITICAL CULTURE AND COMMUNIST STUDIES Archie Brown (editor) POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN THE SOVIET UNION Archie Brown and Michael Kaser (editors) SOVIET POLICY FOR THE 1980s Victor Bulmer-Thomas STUDIES IN THE ECONOMICS OF LATIN AMERICA S.B. Burman CHIEFDOM POLITICS AND ALIEN LAW Helen Callaway GENDER, CULTURE AND EMPIRE Renfrew Christie ELECTRICITY, INDUSTRY AND CLASS IN SOUTH AFRICA Robert O. Collins and Francis M. Deng (editors) THE BRITISH IN THE

SUDAN, 1898-1956 Roger Cooter (editor) STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF ALTERNATIVE

MEDICINE Wilhelm Deist THE WEHRMACHT AND GERMAN REARMAMENT Robert Desjardins THE SOVIET UNION THROUGH FRENCH EYES, 1945-85 Guido di Tella ARGENTINA UNDER PERÓN, 1973-76 Guido di Tella and Rudiger Dornbusch (editors) THE POLITICAL ECONOMY

OF ARGENTINA, 1946-83 Guido di Tella and D.C.M. Platt (editors) THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF

ARGENTINA, 1880-1946 Guido di Tella and D. Cameron Watt (editors) ARGENTINA BETWEEN THE

GREAT POWERS, 1939-46 Simon Duke US DEFENCE BASES IN THE UNITED KINGDOM Julius A. Elias PLATO'S DEFENCE OF POETRY Anne Lincoln Fitzpatrick THE GREAT RUSSIAN FAIR: Nizhnii Novgorod, 1840-90 Ricardo F. Ffrench-Davis and Ernesto Tironi (editors) LATIN AMERICA AND

THE NEW INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER David Footman ANTONIN BESSE OF ADEN Heather D. Gibson THE EUROCURRENCY MARKETS, DOMESTIC

FINANCIAL POLICY AND INTERNATIONAL INSTABILITY Bohdan Harasymiw POLITICAL ELITE RECRUITMENT IN THE SOVIET

UNION Neil Harding (editor) THE STATE IN SOCIALIST SOCIETY John B. Hattendorf and Robert S. Jordan (editors) MARITIME STRATEGY

AND THE BALANCE OF POWER Richard Holt SPORT AND SOCIETY IN MODERN FRANCE Albert Hourani EUROPE AND THE MIDDLE EAST Albert Hourani THE EMERGENCE OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST J.R. Jennings GEORGES SOREL A. Kemp-Welch (translator) THE BIRTH OF SOLIDARITY Paul Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls (editors) NATIONALIST AND RACIALIST

MOVEMENTS IN BRITAIN AND GERMANY BEFORE 1914 Richard Kindersley (editor) IN SEARCH OF EUROCOMMUNISM Maria D'Alva G. Kinzo LEGAL OPPOSITION POLITICS UNDER

AUTHORITARIAN RULE IN BRAZIL Bohdan Krawchenko SOCIAL CHANGE AND NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY UKRAINE

Gisela C. Lebzelter POLITICAL ANTI-SEMITISM IN ENGLAND, 1918-1939 Nancy Lubin LABOUR AND NATIONALITY IN SOVIET CENTRAL ASIA C.A. MacDonald THE UNITED STATES, BRITAIN AND APPEASEMENT,

1936-39Robert H. McNeal TSAR AND COSSACK, 1855-1914 David Nicholls HAITI IN CARIBBEAN CONTEXT Patrick O'Brien (editor) RAILWAYS AND THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

OF WESTERN EUROPE, 1830-1914 Amii Omara-Otunnu POLITICS AND THE MILITARY IN UGANDA,

1890-1985 Roger Owen (editor) STUDIES IN THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL HISTORY

OF PALESTINE IN THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES Ilan Pappé BRITAIN AND THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT, 1948-51 D.C.M. Platt and Guido de Tella (editors) ARGENTINA, AUSTRALIA AND

CANADA: STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE DEVELOPMENT, 1870-1965 J.L. Porket WORK, EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE

SOVIET UNION Irena Powell WRITERS AND SOCIETY IN MODERN JAPAN Alex Pravda (editor) HOW RULING COMMUNIST PARTIES ARE

GOVERNED T.H. Rigby and Ferenc Fehér (editors) POLITICAL LEGITIMATION IN

COMMUNIST STATES Hans Roger JEWISH POLICIES AND RIGHT-WING POLITICS IN IMPERIAL

RUSSIA Marilyn Rueschemeyer PROFESSIONAL WORK AND MARRIAGE A.J.R. Russell-Wood THE BLACK MAN IN SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN

COLONIAL BRAZIL Nurit Schleifman UNDERCOVER AGENTS IN THE RUSSIAN

REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT Amnon Sella and Yael Yishai ISRAEL THE PEACEFUL BELLIGERENT

1967-79 Aron Shai BRITAIN AND CHINA, 1941-47 Lewis H. Siegelbaum THE POLITICS OF INDUSTRIAL MOBILIZATION IN

RUSSIA, 1914-17 H. Gordon Skilling SAMIZDAT AND AN INDEPENDENT SOCIETY IN

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE David Stafford BRITAIN AND EUROPEAN RESISTANCE, 1940-45 Nancy Stepan THE IDEA OF RACE IN SCIENCE Verena Stolcke COFFEE PLANTERS, WORKERS AND WIVES Jane E. Stromseth THE ORIGINS OF FLEXIBLE RESPONSE Marvin Swartz THE POLITICS OF BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY IN THE ERA

OF DISRAELI AND GLADSTONE Rosemary Thorp (editor) LATIN AMERICA IN THE 1930s Rosemary Thorp and Laurence Whitehead (editors) INFLATION AND

STABILISATION IN LATIN AMERICA Rosemary Thorp and Laurence Whitehead (editors) LATIN AMERICAN DEBT

AND THE ADJUSTMENT CRISIS Rudolf L. Tökés (editor) OPPOSITION IN EASTERN EUROPE Jane Watts BLACK WRITERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA Robert Wihtol THE ASIAN DEVELOPMENT BANK AND RURAL

DEVELOPMENT P.J. Williams THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND POLITICS IN NICARAGUA

AND COSTA RICA Toshio Yokoyama JAPAN IN THE VICTORIAN MIND

Argentina between the Great Powers, 1939-46

Edited by

Guido di Tella University of Buenos Aires and Associate Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford

and

D. Cameron Watt Stevenson Professor of International History University of London

M MACMILLAN

in association with Palgrave Macmillan

© Guido di Tella and D. Cameron Watt 1989 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any license permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP.

Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

First published 1989

Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Argentina between the great powers, 1939-46. 1. Argentina. Foreign relations, 1939-1946 I. di Tella, Guido, 1931- II. Watt, D. Cameron, 1928- III. St Antony's College 327.82 ISBN 978-1-349-10979-1 ISBN 978-1-349-10977-7 (eBook) DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-10977-7

St Antony's/Macmillan Series

Series Standing Order

If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the United Kingdom we may not have the rights for your area, in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.)

Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 2XS, England.

Contents

List of Maps VII

List of Contributors VIII

Introduction X

D. Cameron Watt

1 Anglo-American Relations, 1939-46: A British View 1 Alec Campbell

2 'The Juggler': Franklin D. Roosevelt and Anglo-American Competition in Latin America 18 Warren F. Kimball

3 The Origins of Misunderstanding: United States-Argentine Relations, 1900-40 34 Joseph S. Tulchin

4 US Political Destabilisation and Economic Boycott of Argentina during the 1940s 56 Carlos Escude

5 Foreign and Domestic Policy in Argentina during the Second World War 77 Mario Rapoport

Comment: Paul B. Goodwin, Jr. 106

6 Disorderly Succession: Great Britain, the United States and the 'Nazi Menace' in Argentina, 1938-47 111 Ronald C. Newton

Comment: H.S. Ferns 135

7 The Braden Campaign and Anglo-American Relations in Argentina, 1945-6 137 Callum A. MacDonald

8 The United States and Argentina in Brazil'~ Wartime Foreign Policy, 1939-45 158 Stanley E. Hilton

v

vi Contents

9 Argentina Between the Great Powers, 1939-46: A Revisionist Summing-up Guido di Tel/a

10 A Northern Summing-up John Major

Index

181

199

207

List of Maps

2.1 Axis proximity to strategic war materials 2.2 The 'German' map

vii

24 25

List of the Contributors

D. Cameron Watt is Stevenson Professor of International History at the University of London.

Alec Campbell is Professor of American History, University of Birmingham.

Guido di Tella is Associate Fellow, St Antony's College, Oxford, and Professor of Economics at the University of Buenos Aires and the Catholic University of Argentina.

Carlos Escude is Professor of International Relations, University of Belgrano (Argentina) and Senior Researcher, Instituto Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires.

U.S. Ferns is Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Birmingham.

Paul B. Goodwin, Jr. is Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Connecticut.

Stanley E. Hilton is Professor of History and Director, Latin American Studies, at Louisiana State University.

Warren F. Kimball is Professor of International History at the Newark Faculty of Arts and Science of Rutgers University.

Callum A. MacDonald is Senior Lecturer at the Joint School of Comparative American Studies, University of Warwick.

John Major is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Hull.

Ronald C. Newton is Professor, Latein-Amerikanische Geschichte at the Simon Fraser University.

Mario Rapoport is Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas, Buenos Aires, and Associate Professor, University of Buenos Aires.

Vlll

List of the Contributors

Joseph S. Tulchin is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina.

ix

Introduction D. Cameron Watt

The papers published in this volume represent the congruence of four separate streams of historiography, one concerned with the revision of Argentine historiography (mainly of Argentine origin), one con­cerned with the history of US policy towards South America (a historiography like that of the Cold War now emerging into a 'post­revisionist' phase), one concerned with the history of British interests in South America and one concerned with the re-examination of the Anglo-American special relationship. As a 'control', it was intended to include studies of Brazil and other Latin American countries: in the event it proved possible only to include a study of the relationship between Brazil and the USA, one which underlines the uniqueness of the Argentine experience and the causes and perceptions which made that experience so different. The role of Brazil in Anglo-American relations however does not emerge with the same clarity.

One theme unites all four approaches, and one methodology. Methodologically, all the contributors tend to concentrate on the internal 'private' history of bureaucratic policy-making and party political manoeuvring rendered possible by the opening of tke ar­chives and private papers over the last fifteen to twenty years in the USA, Britain and Brazil. It is a feature of this stage in the histori­ography of any period that the historians are concerned to 'demytho­logise' the versions they have inherited from their predecessors about the 'myths' and 'misperceptions' generated by the public debate and published sources which were all those predecessors had to work with.

Thus Professor Kimball, Professor Newton and Dr Rapoport be­tween them show that the image of Argentina as emotionally en­gaged throughout the war on the wrong side, a Latin American equivalent to Franco's Spain, a nest of Nazi espionage and the base from which Nazis planned to engulf Latin America prior to the final assault on that last bastion of democracy, the USA, is based on a pair of historical untruths. Argentina was not a Fascist state, Peronism is not easily equated with Nazism or Fascism, and the fantasies of a Nazi plot against Latin America existed only in the minds of a few Nazi emigres of the kind Hitler had purged from his party in 1934;

X

D. Cameron Watt xi

though they were spread assiduously by the Latin American Left and possibly by the British Secret Intelligence Service.

The danger of this approach is that it misses the element in the contemporary environment which gives such myths their immediate reception and credibility - a point stressed by Professor Goodwin. Reading these papers, especially those dealing with United States' perceptions of Argentine politics, one is conscious of the missing dimension of reportage - press, radio, informal word-of-mouth, anecdotal gossip (often masquerading as secret intelligence) - on which public opinion and policy-makers alike rely on for the matrices into which they fit and by which they judge specific reports which seem to require specific action.

In the case of British and American reactions to political events in Argentina, one is led to ask how far these reports fitted in with the image of a 'global civil war' between democracy and totalitarianism that informed so much of the policy-making machine in Washington and so much of opinion in Britain. Parallel studies of American and British elite perceptions of Soviet policy in 1944-45 show how greatly professional diplomats, for example, in both countries were worried by the degree to which public perceptions of the Soviet Union as the gallant populist allies in a war against Fascism might in­hibit recognition of how far Soviet behaviour was deviating from what they found to be acceptable and weaken any reasonable action taken to contain or moderate that behaviour. Public propaganda on the one hand and Churchill and Roosevelt on the other were driven or drove themselves to invent a different Soviet leadership from the one presented to them, so as to persuade themselves that there was a reasonable prospect of success in their negotiations.

It is clear from the accounts of American policy-makers that in their somewhat Dullesian matrix there was no room for the concept of neutrality, at least not in the Americas. (Eire was different, though not all that different; Switzerland and Turkey were further away, less visible, less imaginable, or rather less present in their imaginations.) But there is still obviously room for further study of that peculiar underworld of rumour, misunderstanding, guesswork presented as fact, inference and hypothesis as verifiable truth out of which the reports emerged from which Argentina's war and post-war image was struck. Coverage of Latin American issues in the Ameri­can press is one area of study, provided it can be carried to the persons who acted as their correspondents in Latin America and the milieux in which those correspondents lived and from which they

xii Introduction

derived their reports. Another obvious field is that of the Latin American Left including the Comintern. A third is the activities of British political warfare and of the SIS.

The common theme is that of British weakness. Here again the contemporary historian living in a world where the decline of British power is one of the most obvious differences between the world of 1900 and that of 1989 is at a distinct disadvantage. While willing to recognise that to contemporaries in the 1939-45 period that decline was not so immediately apparent, the historian cannot help but feel that this simply indicates how mistaken or misguided were the con­temporaries he was studying not to recognise this. And when the records reveal, as the British records for the 1930s and 1940s do, that contemporaries were in fact aware of, even obsessed by those weak­nesses, the historian is the more at a loss to explain why they did not draw what now seem to be the obvious consequences.

There is a twofold difficulty here. The simpler part is that produced by temporal distortion. It is comparatively easy for all but the dedicated 'declinologists' to accept that what seems from the viewpoint of 1989, even from that of 1947 perhaps, to have been an inevitable and irreversible process, could seem to those whose thoughts and actions are under study to have been temporary and ultimately reversible. It was not only Churchill, who as Professor Campbell remarks, seemed to have 'a touch- an increasing touch­of Mr. Micawber'.

Much more difficult to assess are the gradations on the barometer of power, the manner in which those were perceived at the time by those studied, and the actual effectiveness of the power seemingly so disparately distributed. This is particularly difficult where the USA is concerned. One source of this difficulty lies in the degree to which opinion policy-makers and, inevitably, historians in the USA over the last forty years have been obsessed with American strength, wealth and might. In studies of 'America's rise to globalism' the only factor to share equal time with this obsession has been the equally obsessive fear that all this strength, wealth and might may, by domestic American standards and values, have been misused.

A second source of the difficulty lies in the perception, at the end of the 1980s almost a commonplace, that much less of this 'power' has been or can be effectively used. From Spruille Braden facing Peron to Ronald Reagan facing Colonel Gadahfi, the impression grows that the power is that of the Big Bad Wolf confronted with the third little piggy's storehouse. While this is bitterly unfair to the power which

D. Cameron Watt xiii

has probably contributed more to the 'Forty Year Peace' than any other single factor, the nature and encashability of 'power' is not much more a matter for debate than the last thirty years of histori­ography allow.

The last source of difficulty lies in the failure to recognise that in the period 1930-1950 at least what governed the perceptions non­Americans had of American power was not their failure to appreciate America's potentialities as a persistent doubt (amounting at times to a near conviction) as to whether it would or could be effectively used. American parochialism, the American Constitution, American simple-mindedness, even what Professor Escude calls American 'ir­relevance of rationality' weighed very heavily on the consciousness of non-Americans. Only the Japanese doubted American persistence in war. It was what happened the rest of the time that worried people.

It is these doubts about the nature of power, about the irreversi­bility of the trend in power relationships, and about the will to use it which make it just as difficult to accept contemporary perceptions of Britain as a power. Partly that is because few at the time (and fewer now) understood the nature of the gamble that Britain had embarked on even before 1914 in the transformation of Empire into Common­wealth, the gamble that Britain could still play the role of a world power as the leader of an informal but none the less binding alliance she had played as the one great outsider in the nineteenth century. If neither London nor Washington could get it right, it seems a little hard to criticise Argentine politicos for getting it as wrong as some of them did.

The impulse for this conference came at least in part out of a reaction between revisionists of Argentine historiography and those of the Anglo-American relationship. In this last field the exploration of those issues which caused friction between the two countries is put in its proper place by Professor Campbell's opening paper which can only find two references to Argentina in all of Churchill's massive six volumes of war memoirs. Since he wrote that paper, the seventh volume of Martin Gilbert's biography of Churchill has appeared, Road to Victory: Winston S. Churchill1941-1945 (London: 1987). That also has only two references to Argentina. The second, a citation from Sir John Colville's diary for 25 November 1944, is worth quoting (p. 1074):

Winant came in with a letter containing a telegram from the President about Civil Aviation. It was pure blackmail threatening

xiv Introduction

that if we did not give way to certain unreasonable American demands, their attitude about lease-lend supplies would change. Winant was shame-faced about presenting it and did not want to stay to lunch, but the PM said that even a declaration of war should not prevent them having a good lunch. The Americans are also being tough, and even threatening, about a number of other things and the PM is disturbed at having to oppose them over so many issues ... There is a sharp wrangle about our imports of Argen­tine meat, the Americans being anxious to bring economic pres­sure on the Argentine.

There were a number of such topics on the fringes of the great issues which preoccupied Churchill, Roosevelt, the British Cabinet and Foreign Office, Roosevelt's free trade court and the State De­partment in the winning of the Second World War. It is necessary to pay attention to them because they are among the issues by which the minute gradations in the Anglo-American relationship in this cen­tury can be measured and celebrated. They are in part a product of the minor and more parochial sides of the multifarious bureaucracies of Britain and the USA. But they could on occasion engage the time and jog the emotions even of the President and the Prime Minister. They are not therefore beneath notice: nor are they a reason why the whole Anglo-American relationship should be seen as tarnished, if not meretriciously 'phoney'. Even the greatest of nerves and the greatest of purposes cannot escape the occasional fall into small­mindedness and petty irritations. Yet what for them were, relative to the defeat of Hitler and Japan, marginal, were for Argentina major issues of overriding importance. Getting history right and getting it into perspective are of equal importance - not only to historians.