Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  But the British retained 11 capital ships in working order, compared with nine for Germany and Italy combined, and eight aircraft carriers to none for its European enemies. The British had two battleships under construction, and the two damaged at Alexandria would return to service in a few months. The United States and Japan were approximately even in carrier forces. As the Japanese launched an ambitious offensive east and south in the Pacific, the United States would be able to move large numbers of land-based aircraft to the larger nearby islands. The naval balance was strained but not dire, though the submarine war in the Atlantic was very dangerous.

  The Japanese emissaries arrived in Hull’s office at 2:05 on Sunday, December 7, about 25 minutes after the attack had begun, and Roosevelt had told Hull to give no indication of prior knowledge of the attack, in order to give no clue of the cracking of Japanese codes. Hull excoriated his visitors for the content of their message and dismissed them. Japan attacked Malaya, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Guam, and various other islands in the next few days. It had begun badly, and MacArthur inexplicably allowed a substantial B-17 bomber force to be destroyed on the runway at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. (He blamed it, not altogether plausibly, on his air force commander, General Lewis H. Brereton, whom he described, with some justice, as a “blundering nincompoop,” yet did not sack him.)

  Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress the following day, beginning “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy . . .” Later in his brief address, he completed his strategic formula begun in his State of the Union message from the same place 11 months before, “we will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again.” The United States would not be an appeasement power, would promote democratic values, and would thereafter maintain an effective deterrent power. It did so, and it was not until 60 years later that America’s enemies devised the technique of attacking it with a terrorist mission that could not be directly linked to any country. It has successfully deterred attack by any other nation since the “Day of Infamy.”

  The dispute with Admiral Richardson over repositioning the Pacific battle fleet from San Francisco to Pearl Harbor created a potential vulnerability for Roosevelt, though Richardson’s insouciance about a torpedo attack and Admiral Kimmel’s feeble response to repeated warnings were serious derogations from orders. Kimmel and the local army commander were replaced and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was appointed commander of the Pacific Fleet. The theory has persisted that Roosevelt knew of the attack and did nothing to warn his local commanders. He didn’t know exactly where the attack would come and repeatedly warned all American commands throughout the Pacific. He had every reason to believe Pearl Harbor would be on high alert; he loved the navy, and was horrified as he heard the extent of the damage. He would never have been complicit in the death of American servicemen and could have stirred equal outrage against Japan even if the attack had been repulsed with minor damage, as it should have been. (Richardson, Kimmel, and Stark, who also came in for some blame, soldiered on in militant self-defense to the ages of 95, 86, and 91.)

  2. EARLY MONTHS OF TOTAL WAR

  Hitler, followed, as always, by Mussolini, declared war on the United States on December 11, in a rambling, hate-filled, and somewhat deranged fulmination. He was not obliged to under his alliance with Japan, but presumably concluded that Roosevelt was certain to find some pretext now to go to war against Germany and preferred to take the initiative. Hitler seemed to believe that the United States was a Jewish-directed country, and that Roosevelt was manipulated by Jewish doctors through “negro” orderlies. The whole theory was completely mad and, though it is irrelevant, Roosevelt’s doctors were not Jewish. (More problematical was the outright quackery of Hitler’s own medical advice.) Hitler knew nothing of America apart from what he learned reading the cowboy novels of Karl May, who had never set foot in the United States, and what May wrote was composed in prison. When war came with the United States, Hitler took this as his cue to liquidate the European Jews, as he had often threatened to do, as if this were somehow a quid pro quo for a war that he had, himself, declared on the U.S., albeit after some provocation from Roosevelt. The Wannsee Conference a month later formulated the plan to exterminate the Jews.

  The Red Army beat back the Germans from Moscow and Leningrad and started a general counter-offensive. Roosevelt had entered the war at the head of an absolutely united people. He had come into the war before he had wished, and had lost some old battleships, but he had achieved the greatest consensus ever assembled for a war in the United States; the lost ships were not material to the outcome of the world struggle, and unless Germany could knock the Soviet Union out of the war in 1942, Germany and Japan were certain to be overwhelmed by the combination of the forces of the United States, the USSR, and the British Commonwealth and Empire. The vast military capability that would be required was already well-advanced in preparation, and in General Marshall, General MacArthur, and Admiral Nimitz, Roosevelt had already put in place three of his four key commanders, and on Marshall’s urging, he soon identified the last, about-to-be-promoted General Dwight D. Eisenhower. Roosevelt had taken a giant step to an American-led, largely democratic world. The Axis was doomed as long as the British and the Americans incentivized Stalin adequately to stay in the war, and the key now was to occupy Germany, as well as France, Italy, and Japan, before the Soviets could, or, in the case of France and Italy, before the local Communist parties could seize control of them. Despite the losses at Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt, having determined that the victory of democracy depended on the continuation of Russia in the war to take most of the casualties against Germany, made a perfect entry into the conflict.

  Winston Churchill came at once to America and received a generous reception when he addressed the Congress on December 26, even from former isolationists. He said, of the Japanese, to thunderous applause: “Do they not realize that we shall never cease to persevere against them until they have been taught a lesson that they and the world will never forget?” The Atlantic Charter, agreed in Newfoundland in August, was called the Declaration of the United Nations and was signed by 26 nations, including the principal allies, in Washington on January 1. The government of Free France was not invited to sign, because Roosevelt was continuing his embassy in Vichy, a regime he despised, but that he imagined might yet furnish him some advantages. His ambassador, his old navy friend Admiral William Leahy, was relatively friendly with Pétain, and he and Roosevelt had conceived the idea that Charles de Gaulle was an anti-democratic mountebank. Subsequent events would prove otherwise.

  On Christmas Day, 1941, a Free French squadron of a couple of small warships had occupied the small islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, off the Newfoundland coast, which Chatham had left with the French to service their fishing fleet at the end of the Seven Years’ War (Chapter 1). Churchill and the long-serving Canadian prime minister, W.L. Mackenzie King, who were both in Washington, were completely unruffled by this, but Cordell Hull was inexplicably overwrought and demanded of them and of Roosevelt that they all chastise de Gaulle for unauthorized belligerency in the American hemisphere. Even Roosevelt, who was unreasonably skeptical about de Gaulle’s motives and aptitudes (he distrusted political generals, starting with MacArthur), couldn’t stir himself to much outrage about that. The main communication cables from the U.S. and Canada to Europe went through St. Pierre and Miquelon, and there was some suspicion that Vichy was monitoring the traffic and passing on messages to Germany. The secretary of state ricocheted around Washington in a righteous lather for the last week of 1941, but was rebuffed by all three leaders. King and Churchill were bemused by Hull’s tantrum, and de Gaulle took no notice of it at all. Roosevelt paid little attention to Hull at the best of times.

  American industry and manpower were rapidly transformed to complete mobilization. Gigantic annual production schedules were decreed, including 60,000 aircraft in 1942 and a staggering 125,000 in 1943; 45,000 tanks in
1942 and 75,000 in 1943; and six million tons of merchant shipping in 1942 and 10 million in 1943. When this was revealed to the Congress by Roosevelt on January 6, 1942, to perhaps the greatest applause he had ever received in Congress, Hitler expressed total incredulity. (All targets were exceeded.) It was soon clear that the United States would wage war on a scale the world had never imagined to be possible. The armed forces swiftly grew to 12.47 million, including an army of nearly 250 divisions, an air force of 125,000 planes, and a navy of 30 fleet carriers, 70 escort carriers, and 25 capital ships (battleships and battle cruisers).

  An extended conference between Churchill and Roosevelt was very cordial and deferred the resolution of the differing views on the timing of an invasion of Western Europe. The British thought the American leaders oversimplified the creation of large and capable fighting forces and the Americans thought the British too cautious and unaware of the power of American mass production, of both the sinews of war and of combat-ready troops. They also considered the British overly traumatized by the bloodbath on the Western Front in World War I. The Americans expected France to be cleared almost as quickly as it was occupied, and in an overwhelming counter-application of air power and mechanized forces.

  The Japanese advanced quickly in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies and 70,000 British surrendered to Japanese forces of inferior numbers on February 15. The Japanese had occupied all of the island of Java, including the capital of the Dutch East Indies, Batavia, by March 9, the day they also occupied the capital of Burma, Rangoon. They moved on from Java into New Guinea. In the Philippines, the Japanese occupied Manila on January 2, but MacArthur conducted a skillful retreat in the Bataan Peninsula, from his headquarters on the rocky island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay. MacArthur defeated the Japanese invading force in late January and the invasion stalled for a month while reinforcements were brought in. MacArthur left Corregidor and arrived in Australia on March 17, after following a direct order from Roosevelt to withdraw personally, having ignored his first order to do so. He insisted on going by torpedo boat, rather than a submarine, to demonstrate that the Japanese naval blockade could be broken.

  The renewed Japanese offensive cleared Bataan on April 9 and forced the surrender of Corregidor and its garrison of 11,500 by MacArthur’s successor, General Jonathan Wainwright, on May 6. The American defense had lasted five months, a respectable performance in the circumstances, especially compared with the British fiasco in Malaya and Singapore and the earlier debacles in Western Europe against the Germans. Roosevelt awarded MacArthur the Congressional Medal of Honor, America’s highest combat decoration. Marshall, an old rival of the recipient, sponsored the award, and MacArthur had been tenacious and agile after losing his air force on the runway, but it is hard to reject the suspicion that Roosevelt was partly motivated from concern for MacArthur’s ability to cause political problems by blaming Roosevelt for the fall of the Philippines, even though American strategists from Mahan on had considered the islands indefensible from a Japanese attack. (It remains a mystery why the Corregidor forces weren’t substantially or entirely evacuated, at least to Mindanao, where they could have joined Filipino guerrillas whom the Japanese never succeeded in eliminating.)

  On April 18, in a strike personally commissioned by Roosevelt, General James A. Doolittle flew B-25 bombers off an aircraft carrier, briefly bombed a completely astonished and unprepared Tokyo, and continued on to land in unoccupied China. On arrival in Australia, MacArthur took command of the Southwest Pacific theater and scrapped the Australian plan to defend Australia in the interior of that country. He said Australia must be defended in the Solomon Islands and that the Japanese must not be allowed to set foot in Australia. This proved to be the correct strategy The Japanese were forced to delay their offensive in New Guinea by the Battle of Coral Sea, May 7–8, conducted entirely by carrier forces, with the ships out of sight of each other. It was a narrow American victory, although the United States lost the large aircraft carrier Lexington. The Japanese lost one carrier and two others were damaged, and it lost almost a hundred aircraft, to 69 for the United States. This forced Japan to defer its attack on Port Moresby, New Guinea, from where it was proposed to invade Australia. On June 3–6, 1942, the United States, having now cracked the Japanese naval codes, anticipated the attack on Midway Island, caught the Japanese force changing from bomb-loaded to torpedo-loaded planes below decks when the Japanese had belatedly discovered that there were American carriers in the area, and sank four Japanese aircraft carriers, losing only one of their own. It was one of history’s decisive naval battles and forced Japan back in the Central Pacific, and assured the safety of Hawaii. The Australians stopped the Japanese advance on Port Moresby in September, and the Americans launched their main offensive to push them back from Australia with their attack on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in August. This struggle continued to February 1943, and included several naval battles that ultimately led to a decisive American victory on land and sea. (Several of the new American battleships, rushed to completion, performed very capably in these actions and won gunnery duels with Japanese capital ships, and sank two of them.)

  The Russians pushed the Germans back to the Ukraine and western Russia from January to the end of April. There were extensive Anglo-American summit and staff conferences in April and May, as the two groups of leaders differed about the timetable of a return to Western Europe. Churchill, visiting Washington, was assuring Roosevelt and Marshall of the tenability of the British position at Tobruk, Libya, in May, when a message was brought in for Roosevelt, which he handed on to Churchill without comment, advising that the British and Australian garrison there had surrendered, to a smaller investing force of Rommel’s. Roosevelt’s only comment was “What can we do to help?” and he and Marshall dispatched 600 Sherman tanks to Egypt on fast freighters around the Cape of Good Hope. They proved very valuable, but not until Rommel, a very agile commander, pushed the British and Commonwealth forces back to El Alamein, about 100 miles west of Cairo. The British held here, on a fairly narrow front between the Mediterranean and the Qattara Depression, which was practically impassable. In the air war, Britain, which had been fighting for its life in the skies of England two years before, now began 1,000 bomber raids over German cities, starting with Cologne on May 30, 1942, Essen in the Ruhr industrial heartland the next day, and the port of Bremen on June 25. The British staged another of their fruitless coastal raids, at Dieppe on August 19, with 6,000 mainly Canadian troops, almost 60 percent of whom were killed, injured, or taken prisoner.

  Marshall proposed an attack of 40,000 in northern France, and Churchill argued that they would be repulsed and crushed by the Germans and he was not prepared to make such a sacrifice just to please Stalin, who was agitating for a western front. Churchill proposed attacks in the Mediterranean, starting with North Africa, and Roosevelt eventually agreed to this, and imposed the decision on Marshall, who feared, with some reason, that the British were trying to suck the Americans into Africa, Italy, and the Balkans, and avoid a cross-Channel attack into France and on to Germany. That intelligent fear did not excuse him from the terrible idea that anything useful could be accomplished by landing 40,000 men in France, where the German Wehrmacht would have eliminated them in quick time, a rare conceptual blunder by the American chief of staff (also the chairman of the Combined Allied Military Chiefs, putting him ultimately at the head of the combined U.S.—British Commonwealth forces of 25 million men).

  Marshall and Hopkins were sent to London, and Roosevelt, who generally deferred to Marshall, ordered him to be more cooperative with the country’s principal ally. He recognized that until the United States had the preponderance of Allied forces in the theater, it was going to be difficult to take control of theater policy away from the British. The argument in favor of North Africa was to attack Rommel’s rear, take away Pétain’s empire there and probably set the Germans on the Vichy regime in unoccupied France, increase pressure on Mussolini, send a cautionary
message to Franco and Salazar in Spain and Portugal not to consider any derogation from neutrality, and increase the flow of supplies to Russia through the Dardanelles and the Middle East. Roosevelt hoped to launch the attacks, called Torch, in Morocco and Algeria in late October, before the midterm elections, but declined to accelerate the timetable when Marshall advised that a full rehearsal would be necessary, which would push the landings into November.

  The Germans defeated the Russians before Kharkov in May and launched their summer offensive, emphasizing a drive to the Caucasus oil fields in the south, on June 28. They moved steadily east, crossed the Don River, and reached Stalingrad on the Volga on August 22, 1942. Ten days later, having captured Sevastopol, in the Crimea, after an eight-month siege, they attacked amphibiously into the South Caucasus. American and even British supplies were flowing into the Soviet Union in vast quantities, and Churchill embarked on a “raw task” in August, making the hazardous trip to Russia, via Gibraltar and south and then east across the Sahara to Cairo, where he appointed Generals Harold Alexander and Bernard L. Montgomery as commanders in Egypt. As agitation for independence in the vast Indian Empire had flared up again, Churchill also boldly ordered the imprisonment of the Indian leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. He was tackling all the raw tasks at once. Churchill then went on to Moscow via Tehran. Churchill’s chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, stared out of the aircraft window and detected only one Soviet slit trench barring the way to the German armies approaching the Caucasus.

  This was the first meeting between Churchill and Stalin. Churchill bluntly told Stalin there would be no landings in Western Europe in 1942, but attempted to interest Stalin in the North African landings. Stalin picked up the purpose of such landings instantly but excoriated Churchill for, in effect, cowardice, along with Roosevelt, for being afraid to face the Germans in serious combat. He said the Red Army was taking 10,000 casualties a day and asked why the British were “so afraid of the Germans.” Churchill improvised a response that Eden (who had been recalled to government by Chamberlain and was now Churchill’s lieutenant), Brooke, and the American ambassador to the USSR, Averell Harriman, considered the greatest speech of his entire long and brilliant career as a forensic orator and debater. He reminded Stalin that he (Stalin) and Hitler had started the war, that Britain and its Commonwealth were left completely alone for a year to cope with the Germans, and that he and Roosevelt were rendering every assistance they could to the Russians, having warned Stalin of the impending German attack and been ignored by him, and that he had not come this distance to be insulted, but rather to create a working relationship, as the Allies were sure to win if they did not fall out between themselves.