Britain is both a strategic focus of the novel’s debate over American neutrality and a waypoint in Alvin Roth’s path to combat. Its importance is measured in the conflict between those seeking to keep the United States out of the war and those supporting aid to Britain, and in the Canadian forces’ preparations to fight in Europe.

Strategic and Political Setting

After returning to America in April 1939, Charles A. Lindbergh traveled on behalf of the government to promote American aviation and expand and modernize the armed forces’ air wing. As war spread across Europe, he added opposition to American entry into the conflict and to aid for Britain and France to that mission. His public speeches and broadcasts accused Franklin D. Roosevelt of secretly preparing the country for war, sharpening their political conflict. When Roosevelt pressed Congress to loosen neutrality restrictions and repeal the arms embargo to prevent Britain’s defeat, Lindbergh’s opposition became more forceful.

Britain in the Debate Over War

The debate over Britain also frames Lionel Bengelsdorf’s defense of nonintervention. At Madison Square Garden, he presented the conflict as a European war and argued that American entry would bring further deaths without alleviating the persecution of Jews in Germany. He invoked his own years studying theology at universities in Heidelberg and Bonn and the German Jewish scholars he had known, who had lost their positions under Nazi rule. His appeal joined concern for their suffering to the claim that the United States should not fight in Europe; the Roth family’s listening response, by contrast, registers the strain between that argument and the danger Bengelsdorf acknowledged.

Alvin Roth’s Route to the War

Britain also enters the story through Alvin Roth’s enlistment in the Canadian forces. He initially imagined reaching the fighting aboard Canadian destroyers protecting merchant ships carrying supplies to Britain. Newspaper accounts of German submarines sinking Canadian ships made the route seem increasingly perilous, particularly because Canada had become virtually Britain’s only source of arms, food, medicine, and machinery after the Lindbergh administration overturned Roosevelt-era aid legislation. In Montreal, an American volunteer persuaded Alvin that Canadian commandos, rather than the navy, were more directly involved in combat. After sixteen weeks of training, Alvin joined an active commando unit and was sent to a secret staging area in the British Isles. The unit’s operations—night raids, sabotage, and attacks on German-held facilities—placed him in the campaign on the European continent. The War Department in Ottawa later notified the family that he had been wounded and was recovering in a convalescent hospital in Dorset, England. Britain thus marks the transition from Alvin’s decision to fight to his arrival at the front, and then to the news that his service had come at a personal cost.