by Lynne Olson
But none of that could be done without attacking the root of the problem, which one administration official described as the “fiction that we can perform a miracle of industrial transformation without hurting anyone.” With a reviving economy, private industry was hardly eager to deny consumers the new cars and other items they were demanding—or to give up the profits that resulted. And no federal agency could force it to do so. The Office of Production Management, set up by Roosevelt in January 1941 to oversee industrial mobilization, was not given the authority to compel companies to convert to war work or ensure that raw materials be used for defense needs rather than the production of civilian goods. With no presidential call for urgency and sacrifice, the all-out war effort that FDR wanted was nothing but a chimera.
During the crucial weeks and months following Lend-Lease’s passage, Roosevelt seemed disinclined to do much about the problem. According to FDR biographer Kenneth S. Davis, “a strange, prolonged, exceedingly dangerous pause in presidential leadership” set in. That malaise was due in part to a series of illnesses that afflicted Roosevelt throughout the spring of 1941 and into early summer. Shortly before the approval of Lend-Lease, he was hit hard by the flu, which he was unable to shake completely for several months. He also was reportedly suffering from bleeding hemorrhoids, as well as increasingly high blood pressure.
Having endured the crushing pressures of the presidency for more than eight difficult years, FDR was, by all accounts, “an exceedingly tired man.” During dinner with several close aides the year before, he had suddenly become pale and limp, then briefly lost consciousness. His doctor told worried staff members that the president had suffered “a very slight heart attack.”
But while Roosevelt’s physical problems almost certainly contributed to his lethargy, it may also have been attributable to his frustration at being caught between the fierce conflicting pressures of isolationists and interventionists. In late spring, he spent two weeks in bed, isolated from almost everybody, with what he claimed was a persistent cold. Robert Sherwood, who briefly consulted with FDR during this period, remarked to the president’s secretary, Missy LeHand, that he had neither sneezed nor coughed while Sherwood was with him. With a smile, LeHand observed: “What he’s suffering from most of all is a case of pure exasperation.”
Whatever the reasons for the president’s torpor, it was causing restiveness and unease in Washington and throughout the country. A government report on current public opinion noted considerable dissatisfaction with FDR’s handling of both domestic and international matters. “The one course more disastrous than having no policy at all is to decide upon a policy and then fail to fulfill it,” a New York Herald Tribune editorial warned. “The United States has decided upon its policy—all aid to Britain short of war. The time has come to implement it.”
Years later, the columnist Marquis Childs remembered that “a fog of confusion lay as thick as a blanket over everything. No one seemed to have the power or the will to bring form and substance out of the void.” In early April, Henry Stimson wrote in his diary: “I feel very keenly that something must be done in the way of leadership here at the center, and I am beginning to feel very troubled about the lack of it.… There isn’t any strong leadership to catch the minds of the people and show them what is right.”
For the British, this inertia couldn’t have come at a worse time. Not only were they losing the Battle of the Atlantic in the spring of 1941, they were close to losing the war.
AFTER ALMOST A YEAR of standing alone against the mightiest military power in the world, Britain was in mortal peril. Financially, emotionally, and physically exhausted, its people “were hanging on only by our eyelids,” recalled Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, who headed the wartime British army.
As the spring days lengthened, the shipping losses in the Atlantic rose to astronomical proportions. The new German battle cruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst joined the U-boat wolf packs in picking off British merchant ships. The amount of matériel sunk in April—nearly 700,000 tons—was more than twice the losses of two months earlier. On a single night that month, a swarm of German submarines sank ten out of twenty-two ships in a British convoy. To the German navy, this period was known as “the happy time.”
Shortly before the passage of Lend-Lease, one of Winston Churchill’s private secretaries passed on to the prime minister the latest in a series of reports of merchant ship sinkings. When the secretary remarked how “very distressing” the news was, Churchill glared at him. “Distressing?” he exclaimed. “It is terrifying! If it goes on, it will be the end of us.” Top German officials agreed. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop told the Japanese ambassador in Berlin that “even now England was experiencing serious trouble in keeping up her food supply.… The important thing now [is] to sink enough ships to reduce England’s imports to below the absolute minimum necessary for existence.”
In that period, Britain was as close to starvation as it ever would be during the war. Rationing of many food items was now draconian; individuals were limited, for example, to one ounce of cheese and a minimal amount of meat a week and eight ounces of jam and margarine a month. Some foods, like tomatoes, onions, eggs, and oranges, had disappeared almost completely from store shelves. Clothes rationing had also begun, and most consumer goods, from saucepans to matches, were almost impossible to find.
The British army, meanwhile, suffered one disaster after another. In April, Germany swept through the Balkans, overpowering Greece and, after inflicting heavy casualties, routing British forces there. The British retreated to Crete, where in May they again were driven out by the Germans.
In the Middle East, a string of early British triumphs over the Italians in Libya turned to dust when Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and his Afrika Korps rushed to the Italians’ rescue. In only ten days the Germans regained almost all the ground that the British had captured in three months and threw the Tommies back to Egypt. Rommel’s victory, which Churchill termed “a disaster of the first magnitude,” was a strategic calamity for Britain, threatening its access to Middle Eastern oil as well as its control of the Suez Canal, a vital conduit to India and the rest of the Far East.
During this bitter time, Churchill acknowledged a sense of “discouragement and disheartenment” in the country. He told the House: “I feel that we are fighting for life and survival from day to day and hour to hour.” Painfully aware that his country’s only hope was U.S. intervention, Churchill lobbied John Gilbert Winant, America’s new ambassador in London, and Averell Harriman, the U.S. administrator of Lend-Lease for Britain, with an intensity bordering on obsession. He wanted more aid, he wanted the U.S. Navy to protect merchant ship convoys. But, above all, he wanted America to enter the war.
THE MEN CLOSEST TO the president, including the U.S. chiefs of staff and most of the cabinet, shared Churchill’s alarm. At the very least, they felt, protection must be given to British convoys to stanch the hemorrhaging shipping losses. “The situation is obviously critical in the Atlantic,” Admiral Harold Stark wrote to a colleague. “In my opinion, it is hopeless [unless] we take strong measures to save it.” Since the war began in September 1939, Stark had been preparing the Navy for combat, including the start of antisubmarine training for U.S. ships. The chief of naval operations firmly believed that American security required the survival of Britain and was willing to do whatever was necessary, even a declaration of war, to accomplish that.
As forceful as Stark was in urging the president to begin escort duty, however, it was the seventy-three-year-old secretary of war, Henry Stimson, who proved to be the idea’s most relentless advocate. Throughout his long career in government and on Wall Street, Stimson had never hesitated to speak his mind about a course of action once he was convinced it was the right thing to do. In his memoirs, Francis Biddle, who succeeded Robert Jackson as attorney general in the summer of 1941, noted that Stimson was the cabinet colleague he admired most. “He was loyal to the President … but he stood up to
him,” Biddle wrote. “To me, he was a heroic figure of sincerity and strength.”
From the day Stimson joined the administration, he acted as a spur to Roosevelt, prodding him to lead rather than follow public opinion. But on the issue of convoy protection, the president stubbornly resisted Stimson’s attempts at persuasion, as he did all other efforts on the subject. FDR had earlier told reporters that convoy duty would almost inevitably involve shooting, and shooting “comes awfully close to war, doesn’t it? That is about the last thing we have in our minds.” Having sold Lend-Lease to the American people as a way to defeat Hitler without the United States’ having to go to war, he was not about to risk getting into the conflict now, especially with the isolationists again on the attack.
Thanks in large part to the string of German victories in the Balkans and Middle East, the anti-interventionists, still trying to recoup from their defeat over Lend-Lease, found themselves suddenly in the resurgence. Americans were expressing increasing doubt about the British armed forces’ ability to resist Germany, as well as Britain’s overall chances for survival. In public opinion polls, the percentage of people who believed it more important to help England than stay out of the war dipped to just above 50 percent (although it began to rise again soon thereafter).
Buoyed by the uptick in antiwar feeling, Burton Wheeler, Gerald Nye, and other isolationist members of Congress toured the country, speaking out, mostly at rallies organized by America First, against the use of U.S. naval forces to escort British shipping. Joining them was Charles Lindbergh, who in late April overcame his scruples against allying himself with organizations and joined America First. He immediately became the group’s star.
In a widely discussed article in London’s Sunday Express, an influential American radio commentator, Raymond Gram Swing, declared that he believed Roosevelt could “get convoying now if he asked for it” from Congress, but only by a very narrow margin. Swing, who was known to be a confidant of the president’s, went on to say that a close vote wasn’t good enough, that the support of at least two-thirds of Congress was needed for this “life or death issue.” He added that Roosevelt stood aloof from the convoying issue because any intervention on his part would “compromise fatally his position at the center of national unity; he would destroy himself as the symbolic figure around whom a solid national opinion could cohere.” Others inside and outside his administration would have to take the initiative.
Swing’s reasoning, which was thought to be Roosevelt’s as well, failed to convince Stimson and the others to whom the commentator referred. There simply wasn’t time, in their opinion, for such a leisurely, politically safe method of gaining public support. The administration’s activists believed that Roosevelt had greatly overestimated the strength of isolationism in the country and Congress, that much of the power of his opponents stemmed from his “obviously fearful respect” of them.
Reinforcing that belief were reports from around the nation of increasing public concern over the lack of presidential guidance and direction. Vice President Henry Wallace wrote that the farmers in his native Iowa were ready for “more forceful and definite leadership.” At a national governors’ conference in Washington, several governors commented to Stimson and Frank Knox that “their constituents were ahead of the president and their Representatives in Congress and were ready to do more to help Great Britain.” In a conversation with Stimson, Rep. James Wadsworth, the House sponsor of the conscription legislation, said he thought “the people were getting a little impatient” with Roosevelt. House Speaker Sam Rayburn and other congressional colleagues, Wadsworth added, felt much the same way.
Dismissing all such reports, Roosevelt made clear to his old friend former ambassador William Bullitt, who was also pressuring him, that he had no plans for direct, forceful action against Germany. The president told Bullitt he was waiting for Hitler to provoke an incident that would bring Americans together, no matter how unlikely such a provocation might be.
After a talk with Harry Hopkins, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau noted in his diary that both Roosevelt and Hopkins “are groping as to what to do. They feel that something has to be done but don’t know just what. Hopkins said … he thinks the President is loath to get into the war and would rather follow public opinion than lead it.” In mid-May, Roosevelt told Morgenthau: “I am waiting to be pushed in.”
ADOLF HITLER, HOWEVER, WAS determined not to do the pushing. He and Roosevelt were like cautious players in an extremely high-stakes game of chess. Their advisers were pressing both men to be more aggressive in the Battle of the Atlantic, but neither wanted to provoke an incident that might lead to war between their countries.
Throughout 1939 and well into 1940, Hitler had professed indifference to any action the United States might take regarding the war. “America,” he sneered, “is not important to us.” Convinced that his forces would vanquish Britain as easily as they had France and the Low Countries, he discounted, not without reason, any possibility of U.S. involvement. But when British resistance dashed his hopes for a short conflict, the Führer emphasized to his subordinates the crucial importance of not rousing the country he saw as a sleeping tiger. The German navy was ordered to avoid any incident in the Atlantic that might propel America into the war.
In September 1939, after Roosevelt had announced that U.S. forces would patrol a neutrality zone extending three hundred miles off America’s east coast, Hitler—to the fury of Admiral Erich Raeder, his naval chief of staff—forbade German ships to attack vessels in the area. Even worse, in Raeder’s eyes, was Hitler’s uncompromising ban against any assaults on American ships, regardless of where they were found in the Atlantic.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1940, Raeder argued that the United States, as a result of its increasing commitment to Britain’s survival, had shed all pretense of neutrality and that its ships should be fair game. Although Hitler continued to resist the admiral’s appeals, even he could not ignore Lend-Lease and the important shift it signified in America’s role in the conflict. The German army’s high command viewed Lend-Lease as nothing less than “a declaration of war on Germany.”
On March 25, 1941, the German government announced a significant expansion of Germany’s naval combat zone around Britain, extending it several hundred miles westward into the Atlantic, past Iceland and approaching Greenland. In this enormous expanse of sea, German submarines, ships, and aircraft were now allowed full and unrestricted use of their weapons against merchant vessels and any neutral (i.e. American) warships that might try to protect them. Yet at the same time, Hitler rejected Raeder’s request for permission to attack American ships that were not guarding convoys.
Roosevelt studied the new German move for the next several days, engaging in a spirited debate with his advisers about how to respond. Stimson and the other interventionists in his administration urged him to order immediate convoy protection by the Navy.
While making up his mind on the issue, the president answered Hitler’s provocation with one of his own, announcing on April 10 that the Army and Navy would immediately establish bases on Greenland, to prevent any future German occupation of that huge snow-covered Danish colony. American officials argued that Greenland was in fact part of the Western Hemisphere and, as such, was subject to the Monroe Doctrine’s prohibition against intervention by foreign powers. That claim went largely unchallenged by Germany.
Perhaps that was because Roosevelt, in the end, decided against the even more provocative step of ordering U.S. naval vessels to escort British convoys. He settled instead for extending the three-hundred-mile U.S. neutrality zone to a demarcation line more than halfway across the Atlantic, encompassing virtually all of Greenland and overlapping a sizable part of Hitler’s new naval combat zone. American ships and planes were ordered to patrol this vast area and warn the British if they spotted any German submarines or surface raiders.
While clearly upping the ante, both Roosevelt and Hitler remained determined to minimiz
e the risk of confrontation with each other’s forces. The president made clear that U.S. ships and planes were not to fire on German vessels unless they were attacked first. And in late April, Hitler repeated his order to Raeder to avoid any clashes with U.S. ships.
The increased American surveillance was certainly useful to the British, but it did little to stop the U-boat rampage. Since U.S. patrols were prohibited from engaging German vessels, the British remained solely responsible for protecting their convoys, and the losses continued to mount. In the first three weeks of May, German submarines sank twenty British merchant ships in the extended U.S. area.
Roosevelt’s announcement of the Greenland bases and increased U.S. patrolling failed to quell the calls in his own country for stronger action. In early May, a resident of Los Angeles sent an irate letter to the White House pointing out what he saw as the contradictory and pusillanimous attitudes of FDR and America toward the war: “The American people, according to Gallup, believe that the country should risk war, but that it should not actually wage it. We are not at war with Germany, but Germany is our enemy. We will use the Navy for ‘patrolling,’ but not for ‘convoying.’ There is a terrible danger of Germany winning, but Lindbergh is a traitor for saying so.”
GREATLY DISAPPOINTED BY THE president’s decision not to utilize naval escorts, Henry Stimson considered it vital that someone speak out on the issue. That someone, he decided, would be he. On May 6, the war secretary, in a nationwide radio broadcast approved by Roosevelt (in keeping with his predilection for letting others take the initiative), called for U.S. naval protection of cargo headed for Britain, pointing out that Lend-Lease would have no meaning unless such supplies actually reached their destination. But Stimson went even further. He warned Americans that war might lie ahead for their own nation and that they must understand the responsibilities they would then have to assume. “I am not one of those who think that the priceless freedom of our country can be saved without sacrifice,” he said. “It cannot. Unless we on our side are ready to sacrifice and, if need be, die for the conviction that the freedom of America must be saved, it will not be saved.”
