by Lynne Olson
Other key figures in the administration followed Stimson’s lead. Frank Knox proclaimed in a speech: “We are in the fight to stay.… We have declared that the aggressor nations must not be permitted to win. We have irrevocably committed ourselves to see that this is prevented.… This is our fight.” Even Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard got into the act, stating, “It is a cruel and bitter mockery to let the English people believe we are going to make our help effective if we have only halfway measures in mind.” In New York, Wendell Willkie won a standing ovation from the huge crowd listening to him when he dramatically proclaimed in slow and measured words: “We … want … those … cargoes … protected.”
Willkie’s ovation and the torrent of letters that Stimson received applauding his broadcast revealed, as the war secretary told Harry Hopkins, that “people are asking for leadership and not more talk.” In a meeting with Knox, Harold Ickes, and Robert Jackson, Stimson discussed the need to get the president to stop dithering and take action. “I do know that in every direction I find a growing discontent with the President’s lack of leadership,” Ickes wrote in his diary. “He still has the country if he will take it and lead it. But he won’t have it very much longer unless he does something.”
In early May, Ickes, unbeknownst to Roosevelt, traveled to New York to attend a dinner meeting of key interventionists, most of them members of the Century Group. He told them that the administration had been “absolutely hopeless” in educating the public about the need for action and that “since the government was failing the country in this important matter, it was up to the people themselves either to make the government act or act in its default.” Later that month, Ickes told a friend that “if I could have looked this far ahead and seen an inactive and uninspiring President, I would not have supported Roosevelt for a third term.”
Stimson was the only cabinet member with the moral and political stature to tell the president to his face that he was failing in his responsibility to lead. In a tête-à-tête with Roosevelt in late April, he did exactly that. Instead of relying on public opinion to decide what to do, FDR must guide that opinion. “I cautioned him,” Stimson later wrote in his diary, “that without a lead on his part, it was useless to expect that people would voluntarily take the initiative in letting him know whether or not they would follow him.”
Roosevelt accepted Stimson’s admonition with good humor but paid little or no attention to it. Determined to keep his position “at the center of national unity,” as Raymond Gram Swing had put it, the president was happy to let Stimson and others advocate more forceful interventionism. But he was not yet willing to do so himself.
And so the paralysis continued.
WHILE THE WAR SECRETARY and several of his colleagues urged the president to become more aggressive, other major figures in the administration believed Roosevelt had already gone too far in helping the British and risking the threat of war. Among those counseling caution was Cordell Hull, who possessed what one observer called a “constitutional aversion to strong or decisive action.” After a particularly dispiriting meeting with Hull in late May, Stimson noted in his diary that the secretary of state “does nothing but emit sentiments of defeatism.… ‘Everything is going hellward’ was the expression he kept using again and again.” Other key figures in the State Department, including assistant secretaries of state Adolf Berle and Breckinridge Long, were noted for their Anglophobia and antiwar attitudes. Indeed, Long, who did his best to prevent Jewish refugees from entering the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s, was labeled a “fascist” by Eleanor Roosevelt.
Even more disturbing to Stimson was the active resistance of many high-level Army and Navy officers to an all-out effort to save the British. General George Marshall, who was rapidly becoming the country’s most respected military leader, played a complex role in the internecine bureaucratic battles waged over the issue. Marshall had testified in favor of Lend-Lease and supported the idea of U.S. protection for British convoys, but his rationale in both cases was to help the American defense effort rather than to aid Britain. In the case of Lend-Lease, he told Congress that the vast increases in war production mandated under the plan would be of great benefit to the U.S. military as well; if Britain were defeated, expanded U.S. industrial capacity would provide additional weapons and munitions for the defense of the United States and the rest of the Western Hemisphere. As for convoying, Marshall believed that providing naval escorts would help strengthen hemispheric defense, in addition to keeping Britain in the fight long enough to allow America to adequately arm itself.
At the same time, the Army chief resisted the notion that the United States should enter the war. Testifying before a congressional committee, he remarked: “I do not believe there is a group of people in the United States who are more unanimous in their earnest desire to avoid involvement in this ghastly war than the officers of the War Department.” Marshall opposed even more strongly Roosevelt’s plan for an equal division of weapons and other supplies between the British and U.S. armed forces, an idea FDR had come up with shortly after the 1940 election. “It would be stretching the point too far to call Marshall an isolationist,” the historians J. Garry Clifford and Samuel R. Spencer Jr. have written. “But his concern for hemispheric defense and his desire to place American rearmament needs ahead of military assistance to the Allies were compatible with the Gibraltar America ideas of the America First Committee.” In his memoirs, General Albert Wedemeyer, who mounted a stout defense of his own isolationist beliefs and activities before America entered the war, wrote that Marshall “realized that American interests were being jeopardized by President Roosevelt’s policy of extending all possible aid to any nation fighting” the Axis.
Marshall and his advisers were convinced that if, despite their best efforts, the United States was pulled into the war, the only hope for defeating the Germans would be the dispatch of a large American land force to Europe, numbering well over a million men. But in the spring of 1941, the U.S. Army had only enough weapons and equipment for less than a tenth of that number of troops. The Army brass were horrified by the idea that half the war supplies emerging from U.S. factories, scant in number as they were, would automatically go to the British.
Marshall and his air chief, Hap Arnold, also felt that if America were forced to turn over much of its modern aircraft to others, the Army Air Corps would be powerless to help defend the country or participate meaningfully in any future overseas conflict. Arnold, with Marshall’s support, had repeatedly and vociferously protested the transfer of U.S.-made aircraft to Britain. The two generals were particularly upset about FDR’s plan to send to the British 50 percent of America’s new heavy bombers, the powerful B-17s, which were still being produced in relatively small numbers. At one point, Marshall ordered Arnold to “see if there is anything more we dare do” to prevent implementation of Roosevelt’s “even-stephen directive.”
Grenville Clark, recalling his own disagreements with Marshall over conscription, had the Army chief of staff in mind when he wrote to Stimson about his fear of “a too narrow approach by our military people—too much emphasis on ‘home’ and ‘hemisphere’ defense; undue emphasis on so-called ‘American interests’ and a defensive attitude against British views.… If it prevailed, this approach would be the best way to lose the war. It must be resisted and broken down.”
Throughout 1941, Marshall received much of his military intelligence from staffers who were both anti-British and antiwar. Early in the year, he brought to Washington arguably the most isolationist-minded officer in the entire U.S. Army. A close friend of Marshall’s, General Stanley Embick was a former deputy chief of staff and ex-head of the Army’s War Plans Division. He was also a fierce Anglophobe who believed that America should arm itself only for defense. While serving as deputy chief, Embick had openly aligned himself with a prominent pacifist organization, the National Council for Prevention of War. In 1938, he circulated copies of an antiwar speech by the coun
cil’s president among his colleagues in the War Department that, among other things, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment requiring a national plebiscite before the country could go to war. Now commander of the Third Army, the sixty-four-year-old Embick had recently declared that America’s interventionists showed “less historical sense than the average European peasant.”
In March 1941, a few weeks before Embick was to retire, Marshall summoned him to the War Department to participate in secret Anglo-American talks about possible joint action when and if the United States ever entered the war. Embick was an interesting choice for the assignment, considering his isolationism and his well-known dislike of the British and their leader, Winston Churchill.
During the meetings, the U.S. and British delegations agreed that if their countries did indeed find themselves fighting together, their main effort would be against Germany rather than Japan. They also decided that a large detachment of the American navy would be deployed to guard British merchant ships, while up to thirty U.S. submarines would operate against enemy shipping. The British were pleased with the plans, but they went no further, since Roosevelt showed little interest in implementing them.
A month later, Marshall called Embick back to Washington. This time, Marshall wanted his friend to participate in high-level strategy discussions at the War Department about what advice the Army should give the president as he pondered possible responses to Hitler’s March 25 expansion of the German combat zone around Britain.
Under heavy pressure from Stimson, Knox, Admiral Stark, Henry Morgenthau, and other top administration officials, Roosevelt was leaning at that point toward ordering convoy protection by the U.S. Navy as far as Iceland and even, perhaps, all the way to Britain. He also had decided to transfer a sizable number of warships from Pearl Harbor to the Atlantic. If both those actions were taken, the possibility of war with Germany, as everyone knew, would increase dramatically.
At the request of Harry Hopkins, Marshall asked his top strategists in the War Plans Division to come up with answers to two key questions: Was it a sound strategic move to propel the country into war at that moment? Or was it possible to put off such a momentous step?
The war planners’ response was a qualified yes for active U.S. participation in the war effort. Acknowledging that the Navy initially would have to bear the brunt of the fighting since the Army was so weak, Marshall’s strategists still thought it “highly desirable” that the United States enter the war “sufficiently soon” to ensure the survival of Britain. A state of war, they said, would awaken the American people “to the gravity of the current situation” and bring them together “in a cohesive effort that does not today prevail. Production of equipment and preparation in general would be materially speeded up,” and “the Churchill Government would be strengthened.”
In a meeting with Marshall to discuss the report, one of the planners, Colonel Joseph McNarney, was even more outspoken about the need for belligerency. “It is important,” he argued, “that we start reducing the war-making ability of Germany. We do have a Navy in being that can do something. If we wait, we will end up standing alone … I may be called a fire-eater, but something must be done.”
In the course of the discussion, Embick walked into the room. Asked his views, he replied that he agreed with none of the planners’ conclusions. Not only was he strongly opposed to America’s entry into the war (which he said would be “wrong from military and naval viewpoints” and “wrong to the American people”), he was against providing any military or economic aid to Britain. Unlike members of the War Plans Division, Embick did not see Britain’s situation as perilous. Even if it were, he said, “if the current crisis led to the fall of the Churchill government, so much the better for the British.” (Embick’s disdain for Churchill was well known; he had once referred to the prime minister as “a vainglorious fool who ought to be thrown out of office for not making peace with the Nazis.”)
After the meeting, Marshall took Embick with him to the White House, where Embick repeated to the president his remarks about America’s unreadiness for war and the inadvisability of entering this one—or, for that matter, doing anything at all to provoke the Germans. Following the session, Roosevelt decided against the idea of Navy convoy escorts and settled instead for expanded patrols in the Atlantic. He also canceled his order transferring warships from the Pacific. According to several accounts, Embick’s advice, which bolstered FDR’s natural inclination toward caution, played a major role in his decisions.
Not long afterward, Marshall made Embick, in effect, his senior military adviser—a decision that would have profound consequences for American military policy, especially with regard to Britain, throughout the war.
EMBICK WAS HARDLY THE only key member of Marshall’s staff known for his anti-British, isolationist bent. Lindbergh’s confidant, Colonel Truman Smith, also remained close to the Army chief, despite his run-ins with the White House the previous year. Like most of his colleagues in Army intelligence, Smith made no secret of his belief that Germany would soon overpower Britain and that America should abandon what Smith saw as its hopeless attempt to save the country.
Although Marshall had urged Smith to stay away from Lindbergh, he disregarded the warning, continuing to meet regularly with the country’s top isolationist to plot antiwar strategy while at the same time serving as the Army chief of staff’s main expert on Germany. Smith also remained close to General Friedrich von Boetticher, Germany’s military attaché in Washington, who told his superiors in Berlin that the colonel was “in a choice position to know what the administration was planning and could be relied upon to do his best through his influential friends to thwart the President’s plans.”
Throughout 1941, Smith passed on military information to Lindbergh and other prominent isolationists, including former president Herbert Hoover. At a meeting with Hoover, Smith said that no one in Army intelligence “could see any point of our going to war,” adding that “no member of the General Staff wants to go to war but they can bring no great influence to bear on the situation.” The political “pressures on General Marshall were so great,” Smith told Hoover, that if questioned publicly about its attitudes toward war, the General Staff “would be compelled to issue some kind of equivocation.”
For months, Smith had been circulating throughout the government pessimistic intelligence reports about the chances for British survival. In mid-April 1941, according to Henry Stimson, Smith “made it about as bad as it could be in the Mediterranean,” predicting Britain’s imminent defeat in Greece and the Middle East and charging the Churchill government with “disastrous interference” in British military affairs. An infuriated Stimson ordered Marshall to warn Smith and others in Army intelligence never to make such “a dangerous statement” again. The war secretary declared to Marshall that “the success of the United States depends on the safety of the British fleet; the safety of the British fleet and its preservation depends on the preservation of the Churchill government. Therefore, in circulating such rumors or comments, [Smith and the others] are attacking the vital safety of the United States, and I won’t have it.”
Marshall later reported to Stimson that he had followed his order. Nonetheless, Stimson soon afterward received another gloomy report from Smith about Britain’s chances that included more scathing comments about Churchill and his government. Stimson exploded, shouting to Marshall that he “couldn’t stand it any more” and demanding that the Army chief do something to stop the “pro-German influence” pervading his intelligence division. After Marshall shouted back, defending his men, the two calmed down; Marshall said he would think about what Stimson had said and discuss it with Smith again. Whether the promised conversation actually took place is unclear. If it did, it had scant results, since Army intelligence reports denigrating Britain and its leaders continued.
Truman Smith and several of his Army intelligence colleagues also gave strong if tacit support to the America First Committee, as d
id a fair number of other high-ranking officers. Former undersecretary of state William Castle, a close associate of Lindbergh’s and the head of America First’s Washington chapter, noted in his diary that many active-duty military men sought him out to offer their enthusiastic endorsement for the committee’s work. Among them was General Levin Campbell, assistant chief of Army ordnance, who supervised the planning and construction of new munitions factories throughout the country. Campbell’s supportive remarks were indicative of “the attitude, seldom expressed because to do so would be dangerous, of a large part of the higher officers of the Army and Navy,” Castle wrote. “They don’t want to get into this war, and they don’t like the way things are run.” An admiral told Castle that “practically all the Navy is with me. But they cannot say anything in public.… He gave me a list of Admirals who agree and are worth talking to.”
The admiral was probably overstating the pervasiveness of Navy antiwar sentiment, but there was no question that it was widespread in the service’s upper ranks. (Admiral Stark was a prominent exception.) A White House adviser told Roosevelt that many top naval officers viewed the zealous interventionism of their civilian chief, Frank Knox, with “great alarm. They think he is off base.” Knox, for his part, acknowledged to an associate that he “was very much disturbed at finding officers of the United States Navy very defeatist in their point of view.” The Navy secretary described to Stimson “how he had to fight against the timidity of his own admirals on any aggressive movement … how all their estimates and advice were predicated on the failure of the British.”
