Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941

by Ian Kershaw

  It was little different in east Asia. When Roosevelt, in response to Japan’s attack on China, gave a major speech in Chicago, in the heartland of isolationism, on 5 October 1937, it seemed to herald a change in American policy. In reality, it merely offered a foretaste of the frustration that would afflict his friends and allies over the subsequent four years. Roosevelt used the analogy of the community cooperating in the quarantine of patients in an epidemic to imply that the same must happen in international relations in dealing with those now threatening world peace. But when Britain asked for clarification of what Roosevelt’s words meant in terms of practical action, and went on shortly afterwards to suggest a joint naval show of force at Singapore to deter the Japanese, the United States backed away. ‘There is such a thing as public opinion in the United States,’ the message went out, and the President could not be seen to be tagging along behind the British.36 ‘It is always best and safest’, commented the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, ‘to count on nothing from the Americans but words.’37

  Chamberlain did not change his view. When Roosevelt, in January 1938, proposed an initiative aimed at mobilizing countries in Europe and Latin America to agree to principles of international relations, in the hope that a revived sense of collective security, backed by the United States, would persuade the Axis powers to pull back from their course of aggression, the British Prime Minister was dismissive. Churchill later regarded the President’s initiative as ‘the last frail chance to save the world from tyranny otherwise than by war’.38 In reality, the chances of such a move deflecting Hitler were nil. But Chamberlain’s conclusion went beyond this particular initiative. He was adamant that, should she ‘get into trouble’, Britain could expect no help from the United States.39 He preferred to continue down the road to appeasement.

  The United States viewed Hitler’s expansionist moves in 1938 from afar, with disquiet, certainly, but merely from the sidelines. The takeover of Austria was registered with an air of resignation but no demur. Roosevelt appealed for peace as the Sudeten crisis unfolded during the summer of 1938. After the western democracies had carved up Czechoslovakia during the Munich Conference at the end of September, in a vain bid to satisfy Hitler’s insatiable demands, Roosevelt likened their action to the betrayal by Judas Iscariot. But on hearing that Chamberlain would be attending the Conference, where the capitulation to Hitler was an inevitable outcome, Roosevelt had cabled to the British Prime Minister: ‘Good man.’40 With some justification, the American President has been described at this point as ‘a powerless spectator at Munich, a weak and resourceless leader of an unarmed, economically wounded, and diplomatically isolated country’.41

  Moral indignation in the United States at the German treatment of the Jews was certainly mounting during 1938. It boiled over following the notorious pogroms of 9–10 November, the ‘Crystal Night’ Nazi outrages against Germany’s Jews. But Roosevelt was not prepared to waive the quota system on immigrants to accommodate the desperate Jewish refugees. And a large majority supported their President in this.42

  Despite his passivity throughout 1938, as Hitler’s expansionist drive brought Europe to the brink of war, Munich had caused Roosevelt to recognize the illusion in believing that the United States could remain aloof and detached from what was happening across the Atlantic. His anxieties about Hitler, whom he saw as a ‘wild man’ and a ‘nut’, had sharpened.43 The President was by now much more actively involved in foreign policy, regularly reading the cables from abroad, and frequently discussing the issues that arose with Cordell Hull and others from the State Department. He would often receive Hull and the sharp-minded, urbane and polished, but pompous and formal Under-Secretary of State, Sumner Welles–who had attended the same upper-class preparatory school as the President, had worn white gloves while playing in the country as a child and still had an ‘air of suspecting lurking contamination in his surroundings’, his demeanour at best ‘on the chilly side’44–while lying in bed at the White House, propped up against his pillows. They were clear that everything had to be done to prevent war and, should it nevertheless break out, to ensure victory for the western democracies. How to attain these goals was less clear.45

  By the time of Munich American public opinion was shifting already to see war in Europe as likely. But there was as yet no readiness to welcome the repeal of the neutrality legislation, an issue the President raised in January 1939. And the following months would show how little American diplomacy was able to restrain Hitler. One tangible and new development did arise, however, from the changed emphasis in autumn 1938. This was the commitment to large-scale rearmament, especially in the air (though, of course, this could not be achieved overnight).46 Alongside this went Roosevelt’s personal commitment to production of arms to be procured by the western democracies for their own defence–though this was far from universally shared, and even met with the strong disapproval of his isolationist Secretary of War at the time, Harry H. Woodring.47 Despite the opposition, it marked the beginning of the policy of help for the European democracies short of war, a policy which Roosevelt would uphold until December 1941.

  By the time Hitler had overrun what had remained of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, soon to be followed by Britain’s guarantee for Poland, war in Europe within the near future seemed practically a certainty. Many more Americans were starting to see that helping Britain and France to arm against Hitler’s Germany could also be regarded as self-help. The administration, with Cordell Hull in the vanguard, now began to exert pressure on Congress to repeal the arms embargo.48 It was to no avail. The House of Representatives in June, then the Senate the following month, voted to retain it. Six months of intense effort by the administration had met with resounding failure. By leaving Hull to lead the fight for repeal and staying in the background rather than risk his prestige, Roosevelt had badly miscalculated.49

  As for diplomacy, a speech by Roosevelt in April 1939, offering Hitler and Mussolini talks to settle disarmament and trade if they would guarantee not to attack thirty specified countries during the subsequent ten years, met with a withering reply by the German dictator.50 America did not figure prominently in Hitler’s thinking at this time. He had not reckoned with any serious intervention by the United States in planning his aggression. He felt no need to consider any concessions to the American President’s diplomacy of desperation in the spring of 1939.

  Nor did Roosevelt’s attempt in mid-August 1939 to persuade the Soviet leadership that its best interests lay in reaching a ‘satisfactory agreement against aggression’ with Great Britain and France meet with any greater success. He asked the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Konstantin Oumansky, about to leave for Moscow, ‘to tell Stalin that if his Government joined up with Hitler, it was as certain as that night followed day that as soon as Hitler had conquered France, he would turn on Russia and that it would be the Soviets’ turn next’.51 If these prophetic words were actually delivered to him, Stalin ignored them. Within a fortnight, he had agreed the infamous Non-Aggression Pact with Ribbentrop. War in Europe was now both certain and imminent. As the last rites of peace were being read, Roosevelt appealed to Hitler, the President of Poland and the King of Italy.52 He knew it was a hopeless cause. He could now only wait for the inevitable.

  II

  The beginning of the European war nevertheless did have obvious consequences for the United States. Americans could not bury their heads in the sand and pretend that they were unaffected by a conflict thousands of miles away, though many doubtless wished to do so. Roosevelt pointed this out to his fellow countrymen in a ‘fireside chat’ (as his radio addresses to the nation were known) on the evening of 3 September, the day of the British and French declarations of war. ‘When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger,’ he told them. ‘Passionately though we may desire detachment,’ he added, ‘we are forced to realize that every word that comes through the air, every ship that sails the sea, every battle that is fo
ught, does affect the American future.’ But he hoped and believed, he said, that ‘the United States will keep out of this war’. There should be no false talk ‘of America sending its armies to European fields’. The United States would remain neutral, he emphasized. But he could not ask, he added, ‘that every American remain neutral in thought as well…Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or close his conscience.’53

  It amounted to a public restatement of the already established doctrine of support for the European democracies through measures ‘short of war’. Roosevelt could be confident of public backing for this approach. He was aware that opinion was almost entirely behind Britain and France in the conflict with Hitler’s Germany. But he knew also that this attitude had its strict limits. Support for the democracies did not equate to participation in the war on their side. Objections to any direct involvement were as vehement as ever. The only fighting most Americans would contemplate was to defend the western hemisphere against unprovoked attack.

  The President’s own preferences actually accorded in good measure with public opinion. Before the conflict began, he had on a number of occasions made his own position clear to leading figures in his administration. ‘While I am in the White House I never expect to see American troops sent abroad,’ he had declared.54 And on the afternoon of 1 September (the day of the German invasion of Poland), speaking to his Cabinet, some of whom had hurriedly flown back from their holidays, in front of the portraits of past presidents and overlooking the garden of the White House, he repeated: ‘We aren’t going into this war.’ He told his army planners that ‘whatever happens, we won’t send troops abroad’. The War Department’s officials had put one plan in front of him envisaging sufficient reserves to equip a possible expeditionary force to Europe, but the President was adamant. ‘We need only think of defending this hemisphere,’ he declared.55 He recognized, however, that the attempt to preserve neutrality yet offer the support that Britain and France would need to withstand Hitler’s Germany meant the tightrope he was walking would become frayed if the conflict dragged on.

  Some measures could now be taken which only a short time earlier would have been highly sensitive. Roosevelt authorized the War Department to build an army of 750,000 men–more than four times its current size (though compared with the vast legions under arms in Europe, still tiny).56 He had Sumner Welles prepare the arrangements to introduce a security cordon around the shores of the American continent (except Canada) as protection for Allied shipping against naval warfare and the predicted German submarine campaign and personally widened the zone from the proposed 100 to 300 miles.57 Together with Hull, he thought that, in the altered circumstances, repeal of the embargo legislation, vital if help were to be provided for Britain and France, would now be a straightforward matter, and he resolved to call a special session of Congress to legislate for the change.58 In the interim, however, there was no avoiding the fact that the existing Neutrality Act had to be invoked, imposing an immediate embargo on the sale of arms and munitions to all belligerents–something both depressing and worrying to the western allies, who were now legally prevented from buying any armaments at all from the United States.59

  In fact, the repeal of the arms embargo was even now highly contentious, evoking huge hostility from the vocal isolationist lobby. Roosevelt made the repeal his own cause. Where in the spring he had still been reticent, he now personally took the issue to Congress. He said he regretted that Congress had passed the Neutrality Act, and that he had signed it.60 The repeal of the arms embargo, he argued, would mean true neutrality, an end to even-handed treatment of aggressors and victims, and thereby a better safeguard to peace than retention of the original Act. With the repeal, he declared, ‘this Government clearly and definitely will insist that American citizens and American ships keep away from the immediate perils of the actual zones of conflict’.61 The necessary legislation eventually passed through both houses of Congress by wide majorities in early November, after six weeks of intense debate.62

  There was, however, a price for the high level of consensus eventually attained. Isolationists succeeded in restoring the cash-and-carry provisions of the 1937 legislation that had expired in May 1939. The provisions had been introduced to enable the United States to continue to profit from foreign trade while remaining neutral. Goods, apart from weaponry and other forbidden items, could be sold to belligerents as long as they were paid for on receipt and transported in foreign ships.63 There was an absolute ban on credit to belligerents, whether from the US Treasury or from private bankers.64 The cash-and-carry provisions were advantageous to countries with large cash reserves and strong naval power. Britain and France, rather than Germany, would benefit in Europe. But in the Far East, the perverse effect would be to help Japan at the expense of China. Despite the repeal of the arms embargo, the questions were whether the western democracies could pay for the weapons they needed, and whether, even if the finance could be found, the Americans were willing to supply them in the quantities necessary. Both issues would remain unresolved for more than a year.

  As the ‘phoney war’–the sarcastic term invented by the isolationist Republican Senator William E. Borah somehow stuck–dragged on into 1940, Roosevelt sent Sumner Welles to Rome, Berlin, Paris and London unofficially to test the waters for a possible negotiated peace. Welles returned at the beginning of April suitably chastened about any chance of a diplomatic initiative to end the conflict. Mussolini had, indeed, said he thought a negotiated peace between Germany and the Allies possible, given settlement of all German and Italian territorial demands. But Welles had become aware that any influence Mussolini might once have possessed had vanished, and he was certain that the Duce would take Italy into the war, when the moment was opportune. Welles had been depressed by the belligerence in Berlin and the low morale of the French. Only in London, in the resilience shown by Winston Churchill, restored to the Cabinet as First Lord of the Treasury, had he encountered anything to impress him.65

  There were no immediate consequences in Washington from Welles’s bleak report. In fact, within days of the Under-Secretary returning, the ‘phoney war’ came to an abrupt end with the German attack on Denmark and Norway. A month later, the war spectacularly erupted into a new and highly dangerous phase as Hitler launched his devastating western offensive. The President’s offer to Mussolini to act as an intermediary in any peace settlement, if Italy would agree to stay out of the war, was, as we saw, peremptorily rejected.66 For the central players in American foreign policy, as Sumner Welles later put it, May and June 1940 amounted to ‘a nightmare of frustration. For the United States government had no means whatever, short of going to war, to which American public opinion was in any case overwhelmingly opposed, of diverting or checking the world cataclysm’ and, with that, the threat to the United States itself.67 He might have added that even a declaration of war by the United States, however unthinkable at the time, would have presented not the slightest hindrance to Hitler nor caused him to hesitate. In spring 1940 the United States possessed neither the military nor the logistical capability to enter the war and block German military ambitions. Little had been done about rearmament. When the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, pleaded for aeroplanes to be sent from the United States, William Bullitt, the American ambassador in Paris, had to tell him that there were none to be had.68 Indeed, the United States itself only had 1,350 planes available at the time for its own defence.69 It was the same in response to Reynaud’s desperate request for old warships. None could be spared.70 Roosevelt could only propose sending over 2,000 guns, French in fact, that had been standard issue in the First World War.71 The American regular army comprised 245,000 men at this time, twentieth in world rankings, one place behind the Dutch. It had only five fully equipped divisions (the Germans deployed 141 divisions in the western campaign alone), equipped with weapons often still of First World War vintage.72 Even transporting this puny army across the Atlantic could not have been achieved before Hitler ha
d already overrun the Low Countries and France.

  As spring drew to a close and the French sued for peace on 17 June then five days later signed a humiliating capitulation, there were few grounds for optimism in Washington about Britain’s capacity to stay in the fight. The new British Prime Minister certainly symbolized the new determination in Britain that had impressed Sumner Welles a few weeks earlier. At the most despairing moment towards the end of May, with the British army stranded at Dunkirk, Churchill had indeed persuaded his colleagues in the War Cabinet that the only rational strategy open to Britain was to hold out, dismiss any prospect of negotiation and wait for American help. Whether, and if so when, such help of any meaningful kind would come was at this juncture an open question. Churchill could only hope, not reckon with it. But at least the government now showed defiance. And the British Expeditionary Force had been rescued from Dunkirk. On the last day of the evacuation from Dunkirk, 4 June, Churchill had produced an oratorical masterpiece in a speech to the House of Commons, expressing the new spirit. ‘We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,’ Churchill told his American listeners to the transatlantic broadcast. ‘We shall never surrender.’ Even were Britain to be subjugated, the Empire and the British Fleet would fight on from beyond the seas ‘until in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old’.73

  It was powerful rhetoric, without a doubt, and not without impact across the Atlantic. Yet it could not dispel the prevailing pessimism about Britain’s fate. The American ambassador in London, Joseph Kennedy, had long been a prophet of doom. He thought that in the wake of Dunkirk Hitler would make the British an offer they could not refuse.74 Others saw no grounds to disagree that Britain would be incapable of holding out. Roosevelt was told that Britain’s chances of survival were one in three.75 The President had his own profound doubts, not least about the fate of the British fleet in the event of a surrender.76