by Dick Cheney
As Marshall detailed everything that was needed immediately, including significant increases in funding for additional men and equipment, Morgenthau encouraged him not to hold back. “I don’t scare easily,” he said a few hours into the meeting, “and I am not scared yet.” Marshall responded that the overwhelming need “makes me dizzy.” Morgenthau told him, “It makes me dizzy if we don’t get it.”
With Marshall at his side, Morgenthau placed a call to Colonel Edwin “Pa” Watson, Roosevelt’s trusted military aide. He explained that Marshall had been asked to go up to Capitol Hill on Monday, May 13, to give “confidential figures” of what the Army needed. Morgenthau wanted Marshall to see the president first. Watson agreed to make time for them on the president’s schedule. When Marshall and Morgenthau arrived at the White House on Monday morning, both knew they were about to have a make-or-break meeting.
Morgenthau began by detailing the case for the massive and urgent buildup Marshall needed. He also urged the president to establish a civilian body to oversee the industrial mobilization required to arm America and her allies. The president wasn’t convinced. After unsuccessfully attempting to sway Roosevelt, Morgenthau told him, “Well, I still think you’re wrong.” “You’ve filed your protest,” Roosevelt said.
Sensing that he was in serious danger of losing the argument, Morgenthau asked the president if he would at least hear directly from General Marshall. “Well, I know exactly what he would say. There is no necessity for me hearing him at all.” General Marshall realized it was a desperate situation, “catastrophic in its possibilities.” Years later, Marshall explained, “I felt he might be president, but I had certain knowledge which I was sure he didn’t possess or which he didn’t grasp.”
Marshall was a formal man, with the highest regard for the chain of command and for civilian control of the military. He declined invitations to socialize with the president, not wanting to become too familiar with the commander in chief. It was only because he believed the future of the nation might be at stake that he was able to do what he did next.
As General Marshall recalled later, when Roosevelt was ending the meeting, Marshall walked over to him, “stood looking down at him and said, ‘Mr. President, may I have three minutes?’ ” Perhaps startled by Marshall’s directness, Roosevelt replied, “Of course, General Marshall, of course.”
Marshall began by supporting Morgenthau’s argument that the president should appoint a civilian organization to oversee the industrial side of mobilization. Roosevelt had said it was unnecessary because he was dividing the duties between Morgenthau, presidential advisor Harry Hopkins, and himself. To demonstrate the untenable nature of this plan, Marshall described the lunch he’d had with Morgenthau at the Treasury Department the previous week. Even though Morgenthau had given instructions that the two of them not be bothered, they were interrupted three times on the matter of closing the New York Stock Exchange. Morgenthau had simply been trying to “understand the enormity of our situation regarding military preparedness and he wasn’t even allowed to do this,” Marshall said. He told the president that “none of you are supermen and Mr. Morgenthau has no more chance of managing this thing than of flying.”
Marshall then detailed the needs of the Army. At that moment, when the Germans had two million men marching through Western Europe, the United States could dedicate only 15,000 men to combat. Weapons, rations, ammunition, housing—everything was needed. Finishing his presentation, which had exceeded the three minutes he asked for, Marshall summed up the stakes, telling the president: “If you don’t do something . . . and do it right away, really do it today, I don’t know what’s going to happen to this country.” Stunned, Roosevelt told Marshall to come back the next day to discuss details of the supplemental Army appropriation he needed.
On Thursday, May 16, 1940, Roosevelt appeared before Congress and asked for $896 million, including $546 million for the Army. Marshall had gotten nearly everything he’d asked for. It was only the beginning.
Ten days later the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from the continent of Europe began. Deployed in an effort to defend France from the coming German onslaught, the British force, along with more than 100,000 French troops, had been driven back to the sea. A race began to try to save the lives of 335,000 men trapped near the French town of Dunkirk. On June 4, 1940, Churchill described the action to the British Parliament:
The Royal Air Force engaged the main strength of the German Air Force, and inflicted upon them losses of at least four to one; and the Navy, using nearly 1,000 ships of all kinds, carried 335,000 men, French and British, out of the jaws of death and shame, to their native land and to the tasks which lay immediately ahead.
Although Churchill knew the miracle of this deliverance, he also knew this wasn’t a victory. “Wars,” he said, “are not won by evacuations.”
Nor could this war be won without America. Demonstrating the courage and fortitude that would inspire generations for the duration of the war and beyond, Churchill told his people:
We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and the oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.
Although the men of the British Expeditionary Force had been successfully evacuated, their weapons, ammunition, and vehicles had been lost. Only the United States had the ability to resupply Britain’s forces. Roosevelt ordered it done. Shipments of weapons and matériel began flowing across the Atlantic. Churchill, in his war memoirs, wrote of this transfer of weapons for Britain’s defense: “All of this reads easily now, but at that time it was a supreme act of faith and leadership for the United States to deprive themselves of this very considerable mass of arms for the sake of a country which many deemed already beaten.”
As France fell, the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic raged on. Hitler’s forces attacked England from the sky and launched assaults against Allied shipping on the seas. Britain’s refusal to surrender in the face of the relentless German barrage led Ronald Reagan years later to describe this as a time when the British Isles were “incandescent with courage.”
Britain fought on while her needs grew and her ability to pay dwindled. On December 9, 1940, Roosevelt was on board the USS Tuscaloosa in the Caribbean when he received a letter from Churchill, “one of the most important of my life,” Churchill later said. It began with a survey of where the war stood as 1940 came to an end, and a description of the threat facing Britain:
The danger of Great Britain being destroyed by a swift, overwhelming blow has for the time being very greatly receded. In its place there is a long, gradually maturing danger, less sudden and less spectacular, but equally deadly. This mortal danger is the steady and increasing diminution of sea tonnage. We can endure the shattering of our dwellings and the slaughter of our civil population by indiscriminate air attacks. . . . The decision for 1941 lies upon the seas. Unless we can establish our ability to feed this Island, to import the munitions of all kinds which we need, unless we can move our armies to the various theaters where Hitler and his confederate Mussolini must be met, and maintain them there and do all this with the assurance of being able to carry it on till the spirit of the Continental Dictators is broken, we may fall by the way, and the time needed by the United States to complete her defensive preparations may not be forthcoming.
To meet this challenge, Britain would need “not less than three million tons of addi
tional merchant shipbuilding capacity . . . Only the United States can meet this need.” Churchill also sought an additional 2,000 aircraft per month and significant increases in U.S.-supplied small arms, artillery, and tanks. “When the tide of Dictatorship begins to recede,” Churchill explained, “many countries trying to regain their freedom may be asking for arms, and there is no source to which they can look except the factories of the United States. I must therefore urge the importance of expanding to the utmost American productive capacity for small arms, artillery and tanks.”
Finally, Churchill turned to the topic of finance. “The moment approaches,” he told Roosevelt, “when we shall no longer be able to pay cash for shipping and other supplies.”
By the time he arrived back in Washington a week later, FDR had devised Lend-Lease. Britain would receive loans of the equipment she needed. FDR called the press into the Oval Office on December 17 and explained the program this way:
Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, “Neighbor, my garden hose cost me fifteen dollars; you have to pay me fifteen dollars for it.” What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want fifteen dollars. I want my garden hose back after the fire is over.
America would lend or lease equipment to the British because, as Churchill wrote, “our continued resistance to the Hitler tyranny was deemed to be of vital interest to the great Republic.” This decision was, he later told Parliament, “the most unsordid act in the history of any nation.”
WITH HIS “ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY” fireside chat to the nation on December 29, 1940, President Roosevelt was building public support for Lend-Lease. Widely admired as the program would be in retrospect, many of his fellow Americans at the time sharply disagreed with it.
Aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh, a leader of the isolationist cause, declared that he opposed Lend-Lease because arming the British would serve only to prolong the war. Speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1941, he described the devastation he believed the policy would cause:
An English victory, if it were possible at all, would necessitate years of wars and an invasion of the Continent of Europe. I believe this would create prostration, famine and disease in Europe—and probably in America—such as the whole world has never experienced before.
Ignoring recent history on the continent of Europe, Lindbergh went on to explain, “This is why I prefer a negotiated peace to a complete victory by either side.”
But those who supported the president’s policy made their case, too. In June 1940, Life magazine tried to dispel the notion held by many that our oceans would protect us, by showing how distances had shrunk in the age of airpower. “Life Flies the Atlantic: America to Europe in 23 Hours by Clipper,” proclaimed the opening article. Hitler’s march across Western Europe was covered extensively in reporting headlined, “German Conquest Threatens the World.” In the cover essay, columnist Walter Lippmann addressed the issue head-on:
It is manifest that in seeking to separate ourselves from the great wars of Europe, we cannot rely on the Atlantic Ocean. . . . Oceans are not a barrier. They are a highway. Across the oceans all the empires of modern times have gone forth and have conquered.
One of the most eloquent statements of the case against isolationism came in the form of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, published in the New York Times on June 14, 1940. Titled “There Are No Islands, Any More: Lines Written in Passion and in Deep Concern for England, France and My Own Country,” Millay’s poem captured the weakness of the isolationists’ assertions:
Dear Islander, I envy you:
I’m very fond of islands, too;
And few the pleasures I have known
Which equaled being left alone.
Yet matters from without intrude
At times upon my solitude
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
No man, no nation, is made free
By stating it intends to be
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Oh, let us give, before too late,
To those who hold our country’s fate
Along with theirs.
Millay wrote that France’s and England’s challenge was also ours—and that of all liberty-loving people. The question was, “Can freedom stand—must freedom fall?”
Oh, build, assemble, transport, give,
That England, France and we may live,
Before tonight, before too late,
To those who hold our country’s fate
In desperate fingers, reaching out
For weapons we confer about
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Lest French and British fighters, deep
In battle, needing guns and sleep,
For lack of aid be overthrown,
And we be left to fight alone.
Neither England nor we would be left to fight alone. On March 11, 1941, President Roosevelt signed Lend-Lease into law. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On December 11, 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States. The isolationists’ position crumbled in the face of the reality of the German and Japanese killing machines.
Winston Churchill set sail for America on December 13, 1941, aboard HMS Duke of York. Delayed by storms at sea, Churchill’s party of eighty didn’t arrive at Hampton Roads, Virginia, until December 22. From there, they flew to Washington. It was night as the plane approached America’s capital city. Europe’s cities were under blackout orders. Churchill’s aide Commander C. R. Thompson recorded the sentiment in the plane as the passengers saw the lighted city below:
Those in the plane were transfixed with delight to look down from the windows and see the amazing spectacle of a whole city lighted up. Washington represented something immensely precious—freedom, hope, strength. . . . My heart filled.
Over the course of the next three weeks, the British and American chiefs of staff met twelve times to begin planning the Allied war strategy. The two most significant decisions taken during these sessions were that there must be a single commander in each theater of the war with authority over all the Allied forces in that area, and that Germany must be defeated before the Allies turned their attention to Japan. In light of the blow struck by Japan at Pearl Harbor and the demand by the American people for a response, it was no small matter for Roosevelt and his military commanders to agree to focus on defeating Germany first. British historian Andrew Roberts has called this decision “one of the greatest acts of American statesmanship of the twentieth century.”
On December 26, 1941, Churchill addressed a joint session of Congress. Interest in the speech was intense. Congressmen returned to Washington from the Christmas recess. A thousand attendees filled the galleries. Five thousand more waited in the rain outside the Capitol. They weren’t disappointed.
Speaking of the long road ahead, of the trials and tribulations Britain and America would face together, Churchill reminded his audience that the task in front of them was “the noblest work in the world,” for it was defending “the cause of freedom in every land.” And he had no doubt of the outcome:
Sure I am that this day, now, we are the masters of our fate. That the task which has been set us is not above our strength. That its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our cause, and an unconquerable willpower, salvation will not be denied us. In the words of the Psalmist: “He shall not be afraid of evil tidings. His heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord.”
He also noted that there had been good tidings that year, and the greatest of these was that “the United States, united as never before, has drawn the sword for freedom and cast away the scabbard.”
A week later, Time named Franklin Roosevelt Man of the Yea
r for 1941. Of Churchill, who’d been Time’s Man of the Year in 1940, the editors said he was “a man of the year, of the decade, and, if his cause won, of all time.” Though Roosevelt hadn’t yet led his nation in combat, Time chose him as Man of the Year because “the use of the strength of the U.S. had become the key to the future of the war, and Franklin Roosevelt was the key to the forces of the U.S.”
The day after Churchill set sail from England, another of the great men who would be indispensable to the Allied victory arrived in Washington. Colonel Dwight Eisenhower reported to General Marshall in his office in the Munitions Building on Sunday, December 14, 1941. Marshall spent twenty minutes outlining the situation the United States faced in the Pacific. Then he asked Eisenhower, “What should be our general line of action?” Eisenhower asked for some time to consider his response, went to his new desk in the War Plans division, and returned a few hours later to tell Marshall:
General, it will be a long time before major reinforcements can go to the Philippines, longer than the garrison can hold out with any driblet assistance, if the enemy commits major forces to their reduction. But we must do everything for them that is humanly possible. The people of China, of the Philippines, of the Dutch East Indies will be watching us. They may excuse failure but they will not excuse abandonment. Their trust and friendship are important to us. Our base must be Australia, and we must start at once to expand it and to secure our communications to it. In this last we dare not fail. We must take great risks and spend any amount of money required.
Marshall agreed with Eisenhower’s assessment and told him, “Do your best to save them.”
It wasn’t possible to save the Philippines in 1942, despite Eisenhower’s herculean efforts to direct men and matériel to the Pacific Theater. As Japanese aims in the Pacific became clear, and as America’s European allies urged that planning go forward for the “Hitler First” policy, Eisenhower increasingly recognized the importance of fighting in Europe. He wrote his thoughts on a memo pad on his desk:
