“Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, too, despised the Brits with a white hot hatred. He believed that they were playing the US for suckers and treated the US like mules to fund, recover, and defend their failing overseas empire that they lost to the Imperial Japanese.“Admiral King, for one, deeply mistrusted the motives of the British.”Yes, and what did that get us? Eisenhower reportedly said that one way to have ended the war earlier would have been to have shot Admiral King, whose excuse for not taking ASW advice from the Royal Navy was that he was preoccupied with the Pacific theater. We didn’t initially use the convoy system - and the Kriegsmarine sank US 300 ships in the first nine months - for a loss of zero submarines.
IMHO it is pretty hard to argue that deconstruction of the British Empire was a great service to humanity. The question always is, “Compared to what?"
I’m not saying that distrusting the British was the right thing, I’m just saying that it the attitude was extant at the time.
By 1942, it was clear that they were completely broke and not going to be competition going forward, but were otherwise irreplaceable in the ongoing conflict.