Sophistry never bothered FDR. Whatever Stimson, Marshall, Knox, and Stark might think, Roosevelt was the Boss, and the Boss was saying “no.” The battleships would remain at Pearl Harbor, where they would be safe.26
•
In the Atlantic, Admiral King’s ships had been thrown into the front lines of an undeclared war. But neither the president nor the Navy Department gave him any guidance. King continually pressed Betty Stark for something approaching coherent orders: When a German U-boat showed itself, should the Americans fire on it? What if a German commerce raider were in distress? To whom would his ships disclose the locations of U-boats? King was fond of saying, “We do the best we can with what we have,” but his men couldn’t do their jobs without being told what those jobs were.
Admiral Stark was sympathetic, for he had asked Roosevelt the same hard questions and had gotten nowhere. Stark complained to a friend, “To some of my very pointed questions, I get a smile or a ‘Betty, please don’t ask me that!’ Policy seems something never fixed, always fluid and changing.”27
But to King, the ultimate realist, the president’s policy was damned well fixed—Roosevelt just didn’t want to admit it. “FDR’s basic idea,” he concluded, “was to inch into war little by little.”28
•
In the spring of 1941 public opinion inched toward Britain, though the margin of support grew slower than spring corn. By mid-May, 52 percent of the public supported convoys protected by the U.S. Navy, though 79 percent wanted to stay out of war, and 70 percent felt FDR was either doing enough or too much for England.
Furthermore, the public shift was not mirrored in Congress. Fifty legislators, led by Republican Senator Robert Taft, pledged their “unalterable opposition” to convoys, while a nose count of the Senate showed forty Democrats and Republicans opposing convoy legislation, more than enough to sustain a filibuster. For now, Britain would have to fight the war alone.29
With popular support growing, cabinet hawks—Stimson, Knox, Ickes, and Morgenthau—urged Roosevelt to put the nation on a war footing. The public had gone as far as it would go on its own, they said. Any further movement would require presidential leadership.30
In late May Roosevelt decided to take a giant step toward war by declaring an unlimited national emergency. He would announce a basic plan to meet the emergency, and he hoped to convince the public that America’s safety depended on stronger measures—even measures that courted war.
The declaration of an unlimited emergency activated enormous presidential powers. With the stroke of a pen, Franklin Roosevelt could expand the authorized size of the Army and Navy, compel factories to turn out weapons, and deploy troops overseas. He would assume the most dictatorial powers the republic would tolerate.
He vetted his speech to a large cast of contributors—Hopkins, Stimson and Knox, Hull and Welles—and he put the pens of Bob Sherwood and Sam Rosenman to work condensing information pulled from many different departments. But the speech was Roosevelt’s, and as he revised draft after draft, he knew the public would cast—or hold—the decisive die.
“There’s only a small number of rounds of ammunition left to use unless Congress is willing to give me more,” he explained to Rosenman. “This declaration is one of those few rounds, and a very important one. Is this the right time to use it, or should we wait until things get worse—as they surely will?”31
• • •
As the clock’s hands ticked toward 10:30 p.m. Washington time, listeners across the nation tuned in their radios to hear the president’s words. FDR preferred a live audience when speaking, even to radio listeners, and he delivered this speech before an assembled group of cabinet members, high officials, and representatives of the Pan American Union who had gathered in the East Room. Sweating in the warm May heat, surrounded by flags of the western nations, Roosevelt gazed beyond the tuxedoed diplomats into the faraway faces of his real audience, men and women in homes, farms, and apartments across the land.32
He told the nation the struggle was not a European conflict, but “a war for world domination.” He reminded listeners that he had promised never to send American boys to war except in case the nation were attacked. Yet the word “attack,” he said, was less obvious than it had been in the days of George Washington.
“Some people seem to think that we are not attacked until bombs actually drop in the streets of New York or San Francisco or New Orleans or Chicago,” he said. “But they are simply shutting their eyes to the lesson that we must learn from the fate of every nation that the Nazis have conquered. . . . We know enough by now to realize that it would be suicide to wait until they are in our front yard. When your enemy comes at you in a tank or a bombing plane, if you hold your fire until you see the whites of his eyes, you will never know what hit you. Our Bunker Hill of tomorrow may be several thousand miles from Boston.”
In light of the German menace, he concluded, “I have tonight issued a proclamation that an unlimited national emergency exists and requires the strengthening of our defense to the extreme limit of our national power and authority. The nation will expect all individuals in all groups to play their full parts, without stint, and without selfishness, and without doubt that our democracy will triumphantly survive.”33
• • •
After finishing his speech, a damp, elated Franklin Roosevelt was wheeled out to the cool air of the South Lawn’s rose garden. There Eleanor and several friends, including songwriter Irving Berlin, had gathered for a wrap party for the big speech. Frolicking tunes of a Guatemalan marimba band lingered under the Jackson magnolia tree, and FDR unwound by swapping jokes and anecdotes with friends. After bantering with partygoers, he headed upstairs to the Monroe Room, where Berlin tickled the ivories to tunes like “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”34
Roosevelt, Hopkins, and a few other intimates sang along with the great composer. None of them knew that in another month, the emergency Roosevelt had just declared would take a horrifying turn for the worse.
NINE
BEGGARS BANQUET
AS DAWN BROKE ON THE TWENTY-SECOND OF JUNE, 1941, HITLER’S ARMIES lunged east. Spearheading a horde of Italian, Romanian, Hungarian, and Finnish allies, the Wehrmacht smashed through brittle Soviet resistance and drove into eastern Poland, Belorussia, and the Baltics. In two weeks the invaders reached the Dnieper River in Ukraine, and in less than a month they pushed within two hundred miles of Moscow. Towns were razed, villagers were massacred, and western Russia was drenched in blood.
In the invasion’s first hours, Roosevelt ducked press inquiries by taking a motor visit to Maryland, and some observers surmised he was keeping his nose to the wind. Isolationists, Catholics, and conservatives felt the best course was to do nothing and let the two tyrants bleed each other white. The communist left, which had opposed aid to Britain while Stalin was at peace with Germany, without blushing reversed course and demanded support for any enemy of Germany. “Perhaps [Roosevelt] was not able to make up his mind as to what our attitude should be,” Harold Ickes told his diary. “It would be just like him to wait for some expression of public opinion instead of giving direction to that public opinion.” 1
Winston Churchill, by contrast, harbored no doubts. At London’s Number 10 Downing Street, he explained to his private secretary, “I have only one purpose, the destruction of Hitler, and my life is much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded hell I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” That night Churchill proclaimed to Parliament, “Any man or state who fights on against Nazidom will have our aid. . . . It follows, therefore, that we shall give whatever help we can to Russia and the Russian people.”2
• • •
“Whatever help” Churchill was prepared to give the Russian people included American tanks, American trucks, American bombers, and American steel. His generosity, in light of the vast scale of the German-Soviet War, placed a
n enormous new strain on America’s high command.
At FDR’s insistence, Harry Hopkins hounded the War Department to allocate massive quantities of equipment and raw materials to Russia, Britain, and China. Roosevelt ordered his lieutenants to give those shipments top priority, and he bridled at every sign of delay. “If I were a Russian I would feel that I had been given a run-around in the United States,” he lectured one Lend-Lease official. “Please, with my full authority, use a heavy hand—act as a burr under the saddle and get things moving!”3
• • •
Just what, Marshall wondered, did the president think they had left? Lend-Lease was draining equipment sorely needed for training the men Roosevelt and Stimson had just drafted. The Air Force was short of every type of combat plane, and tanks, trucks, boots, and guns could not roll off assembly lines fast enough to equip the explosion of draftees, much less the Russians, Britons, and Chinese.
The production problem, as Marshall saw it, was due to Roosevelt’s own impulsiveness—his inability to sit still long enough to think through the whole picture. Marshall complained to Morgenthau one afternoon, “First the President wants five hundred bombers a month and that dislocates the program. Then he says he wants so many tanks and that dislocates the program. The President will never sit down and talk about a complete program and have the whole thing move forward at the same time.”4
Worst of all, Marshall knew this exodus of equipment would be for nothing. His G-2 (Intelligence) experts believed the Red Army would not last through the winter. Stalin’s purged officer corps had made a very poor showing against the tiny Finnish army the year before; now that it was pitted against the varsity team, the Red Army was shattering.5
But the president put his foot down. Based on reports from Hopkins, who had met with Stalin, Roosevelt’s instinct told him the communists would not only survive but would eventually swallow up Hitler’s legions, as they did with Napoleon a century before. As he wrote to his ambassador to Vichy shortly after the invasion, “Now comes this Russian diversion. If it is more than just that it will mean the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination—and at the same time I do not think we need worry about any possibility of Russian domination.”6
Henry Stimson agreed with Marshall, but he knew there was no point in arguing with Roosevelt. On the last day of July he spoke with Marshall about Roosevelt’s idea to ship scarce American P-40 Warhawk fighters to Vladivostok in the Far East, then let the Soviets fly them to European Russia. Marshall said a trans-Siberian flight was impossible for the single-engine pursuit planes; the engines would burn out over the long distance, and the planes would be lost or too worn-out to be of any use.
At the next day’s cabinet meeting, a truculent Roosevelt gave Stimson hell for not moving enough equipment to the Red Army, especially those P-40 fighters. “I am sick and tired of hearing that they are going to get this and they are going to get that,” he bellowed at Stimson. “The only answer I want to hear is that it is under way.”
In his diary, Ickes called the exchange “one of the most complete dressings down that I have witnessed,” while Morgenthau, in his, thought Stimson looked “thoroughly miserable.” 7
With the restraint of a veteran diplomat, Stimson explained the Army’s point of view. They had no fighter planes to spare, and any they sent Russia—if they did survive the journey—would arrive at the front too late to help the Red Army. “But in his outburst today,” Stimson told his diary, “the President said we must get ’em, even if it was necessary to take them from troops and I felt badly about it. I didn’t get half a chance with him. He was really in a hoity-toity humor and wouldn’t listen to argument.”
His anger glowing, Stimson growled into his dictating machine, “This Russian munitions business has shown the President at his worst. He has no system. He goes haphazard and he scatters responsibility among a lot of uncoordinated men and consequently things are never done. This time I got very angry over it for he had no business to talk that way in the Cabinet.” 8
•
While the war for Russia gave Roosevelt and Churchill a respite in Europe, the threads of peace were unraveling on the other side of the globe. In response to Japan’s war against China and moves into northern French Indochina, in the summer of 1940 FDR approved a limited embargo against Japan that halted shipments of aviation fuel and high-grade scrap metal.
Japan wasn’t cowed, and talk from Tokyo grew belligerent. In October Roosevelt heard a rumor that the head of the Japanese Press Association said Japan would refrain from war only if the United States withdrew its military forces from Wake Island, Midway Island, and Pearl Harbor. “God!” he exploded to an aide. “That’s the first time any damn Jap has told us to get out of Hawaii! And that has me more worried than anything in the world.” He said he would not mention the remark in public, “because it’ll only stir up bad feelings in this country, and this country is ready to pull the trigger if the Japs do anything.”9
The biggest trigger America could pull would be oil. Japan imported 80 percent of its petroleum from the United States, and its national stockpiles would last only eighteen months in wartime. A petroleum embargo by the United States would cripple the imperial war machine.
Then again, it might force the Emperor to grab the oil-rich Dutch East Indies.
The question of Japan split FDR’s cabinet. Stimson, Morgenthau, Hopkins, Ickes, and Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson demanded a hard line, while Hull and Welles saw an oil embargo leading to a war Americans didn’t want.10
Divided councils had never bothered FDR, for they effectively gave him the deciding vote. For now, he cast his vote with Hull and Welles. He had not given up on a negotiated peace with Japan, and he felt America could not afford a distraction in Asia while Hitler remained the chief threat. “It’s terribly important for the control of the Atlantic, for us to help keep peace in the Pacific,” he told Harold Ickes. “I simply have not got enough Navy to go around—and every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic.”
After a cabinet meeting that month, Ickes concluded, “The President was still unwilling to draw the noose tight. He thought it might be better to slip the noose around Japan’s neck and give it a jerk now and then.” 11
The question neither Ickes nor anyone else could answer was: At what point would the noose get so tight that Japan would try to break free?
TEN
LAST STAND OF THE OLD GUARD
AS SUMMER’S HEAT BAKED WASHINGTON’S BROWNSTONES, DRIVING RESIdents indoors, George Marshall saw dusk setting on the army he had labored so long to raise.
It had been a marvelous force, considering where he had started. Resistance to the draft had given way to acceptance; military service had become a fact of American life and had transformed the cultural landscape. More than 1.2 million inductees were wearing khaki, training in camps, and molding themselves, slowly but certainly, into a competent fighting force. The little absurdities of military life, which America was beginning to relearn from a generation before, became fodder for Abbott and Costello films, Bob Hope jokes, jukebox songs, and comic strips.
The Selective Service Act specified that draftees would serve for a presumptive period of twelve months. But there was a catch. As General Marshall pointed out during congressional hearings on the bill, the law allowed the government to keep draftees in service more than twelve months if the country faced an emergency.
Marshall’s caveat went unheard in the din of an election year, and he sensibly did nothing to highlight it. The public was left with the impression that the administration would send the boys home after twelve months.
As the first draft class entered its eighth month of service, conscripts began asking their officers—and congressmen—if they would be returning to their jobs in the fall. Politicians demanded to know whether the Army would keep its “one-year promise,” and the stage was set for another battle
on Capitol Hill.1
Sending men home just as they had been fully trained would reverse the gains of two years and throw the Army back to 1939. In fact, the Army would be worse off than in 1939, since Marshall had cannibalized the few Regular Army divisions to spread seasoned officers among the new units. Two-thirds of all enlisted men and three-quarters of all officers would be released from service if the draft were not extended. If draftees went home, Marshall would have to reorganize the Army once again just to get it back to its paltry state of two years earlier. As he saw it, the country had no choice but to keep the new men in uniform a while longer.2
FDR was reluctant to join this fight. He had given Britain destroyers, rammed home Lend-Lease, and declared an unlimited national emergency; he had pushed his luck as far as luck would take him, at least for the moment. It was not until June 19, less than three months before the first draftees were to return home, that Marshall and Stimson finally wrung a lukewarm commitment from him to ask Congress to extend the conscription term. They agreed, however, that the push would be more successful if the Army took the lead with Congress, and let FDR quietly work the telephones. For this job, Roosevelt was happy to stay in the background.3
• • •
Because only a third of the Senate’s members would come up for reelection in 1942, it was easier to persuade the upper chamber to go along with the draft extension. The House would be the real battleground, and in mid-July Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas told Stimson an extension would not pass the House. They simply lacked the votes.
American Warlords Page 11
