War Diaries (December 19) (nonfiction)
War Diary entries for December 19
Previous: December 18 - Next: December 20
Diaries
Henry L. Stimson: December 19, 1940
"we had about the longest [Cabinet] meeting yet. The President brought up the question of the sinkings on the oceans of the traffic with Great Britain. The list of these sinkings is terrific, over four million tons so far a terrific loss to civilization and to commerce, all over the world and it is now very clear that England will not be able to hold out very much longer against it unless some defense is found. The President discussed various measures of getting new ships, taking the ships that were interned belonging to foreign nations on one side building new ones on the other. I finally told him the story of my leaky bathtub ... I told him that I thought it was a pretty high price to put so much new water into the bathtub instead of plugging the leaks, meaning by that that I thought we ought to forcibly stop the German submarines by our intervention. Well, he said he hadn't quite reached that yet.
—Henry L. Stimson (diary)