Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941
Page 45
On the day after the presidential outburst, 2 August, the State Department put on record ‘that the Government of the United States has decided to give all economic assistance practicable for the purpose of strengthening the Soviet Union in its struggle against armed aggression’.26 In fact, however, early supplies were on a very modest scale. Exports worth only $6.5 million were dispatched to the Soviet Union in July. Estimates to the beginning of October totalled no more than $29 million. The immediate reality was that the Soviet fight for survival against the German invader down to autumn 1941 had to be sustained with little more than marginal assistance from the United States.27
New life was breathed into the question of aid for the Soviet Union through the visit to Moscow at the end of July 1941 by Roosevelt’s lend-lease administrator, close confidant and personal emissary, Harry Hopkins, later described as ‘one of the most extraordinarily important and valuable missions of the whole war’.28 The mission arose from a personal initiative of Hopkins himself, swiftly backed by Roosevelt (and receiving the approval of Sumner Welles, at the State Department). Hopkins had, in fact, suggested such a mission only three days after ‘Barbarossa’, and the President had signalled his assent within twenty-four hours. Sending aid to Russia seemed infinitely preferable to Roosevelt to having to dispatch American troops to fight in Europe. Nothing had materialized at that point.29 Just over a month later, however, the idea was resuscitated. The outcome was crucial not simply for the necessary spur it gave to material provision for the Soviet Union, but also for establishing a direct, personal link, bypassing formal diplomatic channels, between Roosevelt and Stalin. Hopkins’s mission helped to lay the foundations of the eventual ‘grand alliance’ of the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States.
The idea of Hopkins going to Moscow arose out of his visit in July to London to discuss the meeting of Churchill and Roosevelt planned to take place at sea, near Newfoundland, the following month, as well as matters relating to lend-lease and questions of overall war strategy. The American military had been critical of the British diversion of ships and equipment to the campaign in the Middle East, and urged concentration on the Atlantic and defence of the British Isles. At his meeting with Hopkins and both British and American military representatives, Churchill resolutely upheld the need to reinforce the Middle East and warned of the mounting danger in the Far East. Hopkins realized that information on an essential piece of the strategic jigsaw puzzle–how long the Soviet Union could hold out–was missing. Churchill and Roosevelt, at their planned meeting the following month, would be operating in a vacuum if better information than currently available were not gathered before then. Hopkins suggested he should fly straight away to Moscow to try to find some answers directly from Stalin himself. Roosevelt cabled his immediate approval and sent Stalin a personal letter of introduction to Hopkins. Churchill supplied the transport, and Hopkins–tired, frail and wracked with pain from his long battle with cancer–was within twenty-four hours on his long, hazardous and highly uncomfortable flight across the Arctic route to Archangel, and then on to Moscow.30
Hopkins arrived in the Soviet capital on the morning of 30 July 1941. Wearing a homburg lent to him by Churchill (bearing the initials W.S.C. inside the rim)–he had lost his own hat in London–he was by early evening on his way to the Kremlin for a meeting with Stalin himself.31 They were soon discussing Soviet aid–what was immediately needed, and what would be required for a long war. Stalin stressed the immediate need for anti-aircraft and large-scale machine guns to defend Russian cities. He also urgently wanted a million rifles. In the longer term he required high-octane aviation gasoline and aluminium for aircraft construction, beyond the items on the extensive list already presented in Washington. ‘Give us anti-aircraft guns and the aluminium and we can fight for three or four years,’ he stated.32 It was one of a number of comments from Stalin which greatly encouraged Hopkins. Contrary to the initial views of the American military experts, it seemed that there were distinct prospects of the Soviet Union holding out in the face of the German onslaught and sustaining the struggle in a long war.
Hopkins’s second lengthy interview with Stalin the following evening was even more instructive. The Soviet leader acknowledged that the Red Army had been caught off guard in a surprise attack, and that he had believed Hitler would not strike.33 But, without underestimating the German army–capable, he thought, of engaging in a winter campaign in Russia–he was confident that Soviet troops would hold out. (In fact, his predictions of where the German advance would be halted turned out to be highly optimistic. The territorial losses soon became far more severe than he had anticipated.) And once the autumn rains began, he was sure the Germans would have to go on the defensive. He provided Hopkins with details of Soviet armaments and production rates in a display of frankness that Laurence Steinhardt, the American ambassador in Moscow, found astonishing. Asked about the location of munitions plants, Stalin told Hopkins that many of the larger factories had already been dispersed eastwards. He jotted down on a piece of paper a repeated urgent request for guns–anti-aircraft, machine and rifles–and aluminium. And he immediately welcomed Hopkins’s suggestion of a tripartite conference of the emerging allies–the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States–in Moscow once the front had stabilized, which he presumed would be by October, to explore the relative strategic interests of the three countries and how best to satisfy Soviet requirements.34
Finally, after surveying the military situation, Stalin asked Hopkins to pass a personal message to Roosevelt, urging the United States to enter the war against Hitler. He thought Britain and the Soviet Union, without the help of the United States, would find it difficult to crush the German military machine. It was inevitable, in his view, that the United States and Germany would eventually fight each other. Remarkably, he was even prepared–no doubt a sign of his desperation–to welcome American troops on any part of the Russian front and entirely under American control. He ended by stating his confidence that the Red Army could hold out, but added that ‘the problem of supply by next spring would be a serious one and that he needed our help’. This part of Hopkins’s report was marked ‘For the President Only’, and kept in a single copy.35
Hopkins left Moscow on 1 August, greatly impressed by Stalin and what he had heard of the Soviet determination to withstand the German attack. In the haste of his departure from the Soviet capital, he managed to leave behind his bag of essential medicines, and was ill, exhausted and in great discomfort on what seemed an endless, turbulent return flight in strong headwinds from Archangel to Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland. Looking at the end of his tether, more dead than alive, Hopkins was given two days to recover before joining Churchill on board the Prince of Wales for the battleship’s journey across the Atlantic for the meeting with President Roosevelt off Newfoundland.36
Hopkins’s Moscow trip was a crucial juncture on the road to providing aid–in time to prove indispensable–for the Soviet war effort. A more positive image of Stalin and the Soviet Union began to circulate in influential American newspapers. Opinion polls showed that most Americans were in favour of aid to the Soviet Union. One reason was the belief that if the Russians were helped, Hitler could be defeated in Europe without American intervention.37 The positive public opinion helped Roosevelt ignore the opposition of isolationists to Soviet aid, which was now being planned on a larger basis. Most importantly, Hopkins’s optimism about the Soviet capacity to withstand the invasion seemed ever more realistic as the weeks passed. Certainly, the Germans had made massive advances, greater than Stalin had predicted in his talks with Hopkins. But the presumption among military experts in both America and Britain of a rapid German triumph had proved false. And as the calendar dragged slowly towards the time when the severe Russian weather would set in, it began to appear possible, even likely, that Hitler had bitten off more than he could chew.
By September, despite further major Soviet setbacks, including the d
evastating loss of Kiev during that month, there was no doubt that the German advance had slowed. Roosevelt and Churchill felt able to embark on the planning of long-term substantial and coordinated aid.38 The meeting of British, American and Soviet representatives, initiated by Hopkins’s visit, took place in Moscow at the end of the month, and the United States and Britain (with her Empire) agreed to meet as many as possible of Stalin’s requests, offering aircraft (1,800 over the next nine months), tanks, aluminium, 90,000 jeeps and lorries and much else besides.39 The first agreement for deliveries was signed on 1 October.40
Transport and payment were still problems. Roosevelt, conscious of public opinion which, though mainly (other than loud opposition from the isolationist lobby) keen to supply aid, was equally keen that the Soviets should pay for it, and without extended credit, was still seeking to extract payment from Russian gold reserves. When the unpalatable Soviet ambassador, Konstantin Oumansky, proved stubborn, unaccommodating and unwilling to acknowledge that gold reserves could be used to cover payments, an angry and frustrated Roosevelt described him in a Cabinet meeting as ‘a dirty little liar’.41 But the President was already preparing to provide aid by extending lend-lease to Stalin. Spurred by the positive public response, despite the vociferous isolationists, to reports brought back from the recent Moscow conference of tough Soviet resistance, he was now ready to test the issue in Congress. To ensure that his proposal would not be blocked, he included it in a bill for large-scale appropriations for the armed forces, something hard for patriotic congressmen to reject.42
On 10 October an amendment by isolationists to prevent the Soviet Union from benefiting from lend-lease was defeated in the House of Representatives then, almost a fortnight later, in the Senate. With that, the President knew he was home and dry. Near the end of the month, he let Stalin know that the Soviet Union would receive up to $1 billion of lend-lease aid, to be repaid without interest over a ten-year period, beginning five years after the end of the war. By 1 November Roosevelt had congressional sanction. The American offer was made public five days later and on 7 November the Soviet Union was deemed eligible for aid under lend-lease. By then, the Germans were no more than thirty miles from Moscow. But American opinion was now overwhelmingly behind the Soviet Union, urging on the Red Army, keen to support its heroic fight, and feeling that, even in this dark hour, and even if Moscow itself were to fall, Soviet resilience might ultimately prevail.43
Meanwhile, the longer the Red Army held out, the more chance there was that the mighty arsenal of the United States would start to have an effect. Equipment to the value of only $65 million had reached the Soviet Union by the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Soviet repulse of the German incursion in December almost at the gates of Moscow owed as good as nothing to western aid. That the Americans would eventually provide more than $10 billion through lend-lease was foreseen by no one at this juncture.44 But, over time, this aid would make an indispensable contribution to the Soviet war effort.
In the immediate term, the extension of aid to the Soviet Union, a move in which Roosevelt’s personal hand had been both visible and decisive, drew the United States yet one step closer towards direct involvement in the European war. Roosevelt had faced a choice. His military advisers had been dubious about the wisdom of committing aid in what they thought was likely to be a lost cause. Isolationists and Catholics had formed a voluble body of oppositional opinion at home. Others in his entourage, however, had pressed for a commitment. Though initially cautious, as usual, Roosevelt had been more optimistic from the start than most of his advisers about the Soviet capacity to hold out. And he had immediately grasped that Hitler’s opening of an eastern front held a potential key to the entire war. In a letter to his ambassador in Vichy France on 26 June, he had written: ‘Now comes this Russian diversion. If it is more than just that, it will mean the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination.’45 It followed that the United States should provide as much support as possible for the Soviet defence. He had given, therefore, prompt backing to Hopkins’s mission, and had then been ready to take the extension of lend-lease to Congress, despite known continuing opposition.
Retreating from a commitment to aid for the Soviet Union in the teeth of such opposition was never likely. It would have been to back minority opinion against the majority that favoured aid. And it would have reversed the course of action ‘short of war’ that Roosevelt had, whatever the tactical hesitancy at times, consistently followed. Moreover, unlike the isolationists, Roosevelt had never viewed Hitler’s Russian war through the narrow lens of letting two bloodthirsty dictators slug it out in the hope of preventing the United States from having to fight. He was well aware that it was only a matter of time before America would have to enter the war. And this would mean, despite his election promise the previous year, eventually having to send large numbers of American troops to fight in Europe if the objective of defeating Nazism were to be attained.
In the personal message he had sent via Hopkins, Stalin had openly stated that Hitler’s army would finally be crushed only once the United States had entered the fray. This was no more than what Roosevelt’s own military advisers were telling him. In July the army’s War Plans Division started work on preparing an extensive Victory Program (which would eventually be delivered to the President in September) surveying projected needs on all likely military fronts. It came up with the conclusion that the complete military defeat of Germany could only be accomplished through the United States entering the war and sending a large force–probably some five million men–to fight in Europe. It envisaged an army totalling almost nine million men to be equipped, trained and mobilized for operations by 1 July 1943, a requirement demanding a doubling of production plans.46
Roosevelt had always seen Hitler, not Stalin, as the threat to American security. ‘I do not think we need worry about any possibility of Russian domination,’ he had written just after the German invasion had begun.47 Domination by a victorious Germany, on the other hand, could not be ruled out. Support for Stalin was, then, the logical and necessary policy. Still, it fell short of the actual participation for which neither the President nor his people were ready. And the bitter fighting in the Soviet Union was far away. If anything was going to prompt the United States to enter the shooting match, it would have to arise much closer to home. It seemed highly likely to be the intensified conflict in the Atlantic.
II
In a letter to Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, on 1 July, Roosevelt had expressed his view ‘that if the Russians should fail to hold out through the summer, there may be an intensified effort against Britain itself, and especially for control of the Atlantic. We may be able to help a good deal more than seems apparent today,’ he added.48 It was a cryptic allusion to the issue of providing escorts for convoys. To Stimson, Knox and others, the diversion of Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union had provided the ideal moment to take the initiative in the Atlantic. They wanted Roosevelt to seize the opportunity while it lasted to introduce the escorting of convoys by American warships. The President seemed for a while to accept the arguments and agreed to the compiling of plans for escorting ships of any nationality in the western Atlantic, to take effect from 11 July 1941. It looked as if he had taken a crucial step, involving the protection of British convoys by American armed vessels. It was a step his military advisers had long advocated. But within days, most probably concerned about public anxieties about escorting and how this might play into the hands of his congressional opponents, he changed his mind. The uncertainties about Japan meant that he would not permit Knox to transfer more warships from the Pacific to the Atlantic. And Knox had his work cut out to persuade the President to approve plans to escort even American ships as far as Iceland.49 Once more, he appeared to the ‘hawks’ in his Cabinet to be backtracking when boldness was called for.50
In early July, nevertheless, Roosevelt did take another step towards the brink–and in this case unquestionably a bold one. On 7
July a brigade of 4,400 American marines landed to begin the occupation of Iceland. This was Roosevelt indeed taking advantage of Hitler’s ‘diversion’ to the east to enhance the security of the western hemisphere.51
The move had a prehistory stretching back to May 1940, when Churchill, anxious to avoid a sudden German occupation of such a vital strategic location astride the Atlantic shipping lanes, had sent a British infantry brigade to the island. Reinforcements of British and Canadian troops had followed in June and July. But Churchill had been anxious to redeploy the troops elsewhere, and also keen to involve the United States more directly in the war. He wanted American troops to replace the British force at the earliest opportunity. The British and American military had then agreed, early in 1941, that defence of the island in the event of war would fall to the United States. By mid-June, Admiral Stark had designed instructions to put in the American troops, at this point envisaged as being under British command. ‘I realize that this is practically an act of war,’ he jotted on his cover note to Harry Hopkins who, Stark hoped, would smooth the passage of his operational instructions with the President.52 He gained Roosevelt’s approval. But the President would not act without a formal invitation from the government of Iceland, which was not forthcoming until 1 July.53 Six days later Roosevelt announced the move into Iceland, ‘to supplement and perhaps eventually replace the British force’, as he put it, though the relief of an equivalent number of British troops began straight away.54 The dispatch of marines rather than soldiers from the army enabled the President to bypass the restrictions–highly sensitive to public opinion–under the Selective Service Act, which prevented draftees from serving outside the western hemisphere. The marines were volunteers, professional fighting men, as they saw themselves, and not the ‘boys’ whom Roosevelt had promised only months earlier would not be sent to fight in foreign wars.55