American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  The facts, as Roosevelt knew, were far more equivocal. Greer had been pinpointing the U-boat’s location for a British depth charge bomber, and there was no hard evidence the German captain had even known Greer’s nationality.

  But to FDR, freedom of the seas was a just cause for tightening the screws on Nazi commerce raiders. Details did not concern him.3

  His fireside chat shored up public support for his anti-German stance. A Gallup poll in late September showed that 62 percent of the public favored taking a hoe to the rattlesnakes in the front yard. The same survey found 70 percent agreeing that the defeat of Germany was more important than keeping America out of war. After years of slow awakening, the public was ready to go to war with Germany.

  The question was, when would Roosevelt ask them to draw the sword? 4

  •

  Ernie King knew that if he took a hoe to the rattlesnakes, the snakes would bite back. A week after Roosevelt’s speech, a U-boat sank the American freighter Pink Star off Greenland’s coast. The attack sent to the bottom enough cheese to supply 3,500,000 Britons for a week, 420,000 quarts equivalent of powdered milk, and enough orange juice to provide 91,000 citizens with vitamin C for seven days. Pink Star was followed to her grave by USS Kearny, one of King’s newest destroyers, and the destroyer Reuben James, torpedoed by the U-552 off Iceland, taking down more than a hundred sailors. The United States was at war, whether Roosevelt admitted it or not.

  The losses of Reuben James and Kearny were bitter pills for Ernie King to swallow. Having penned the “shoot on sight” orders, he spent some bleak hours in his cabin mulling over the circumstances that had led to the deaths of those men. His men.5

  Yet the realist in King banished his sentimental side belowdecks. Divorcing personal feelings from professional judgment, he wrote a friend, “The Kearny incident is but the first of many that, in the nature of things, are bound to occur. It is likely that repetition will lead to open assumption of a war status. . . . I’m afraid the citizenry will have to learn the bitter truth that war is not waged with words or promises or vituperation but with the realities of peril, hardships, and killing—vide Winston Churchill’s ‘blood, sweat and tears.’”6

  As the war at sea pitched and tossed, the public, not comprehending tonnage or sea-lanes or shipyard production, looked to its flesh-and-blood leaders to give a face to abstract policy. That November, readers saw King’s stern face staring from a Life magazine cover under the eye-catching heading, “King of the Atlantic: America’s Triple-Threat Admiral is the Stern, Daring Model of a War Commander.”

  But the realist in King also knew that with one year left until mandatory retirement at age sixty-four, America’s triple-threat admiral would probably sail into his final port before war formally began. His naval career, launched during the Spanish-American War, was about to drop anchor without the great prize he had chased his entire professional life—Chief of Naval Operations.

  With a heavy pen and a heavier heart, King began catching up with old acquaintances. He thanked them for their friendship over the years, and told them that once his tour with the Atlantic Fleet was over, some younger, luckier admiral would take the helm against Hitler.7

  •

  Or Hirohito. Driven by victories in China, insecurity over economic resources, and that intoxicating drug, national pride, Japan’s reluctant prime minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, was pushed into an unyielding stance against its great Pacific rival, the United States.

  In 1940, winds of nationalism swept into power Tokyo’s hawks, led by a firebrand war minister, General Hideki Tojo. The presence of Tojo and other militants in Prince Konoye’s cabinet heightened anxiety among westerners that Japan was setting her sights on the resource-rich lands of Southeast Asia. Her conclusion of a pact with Germany and Italy in September 1940 fueled fears of Nippon hegemony over an “East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.” As if speaking directly to Roosevelt, the tripartite treaty pledged each nation to aid any signatory “attacked by a power at present not involved in the European War or in the Sino-Japanese conflict.”8

  Swayed by its powerful military cliques, the Japan of 1941 coveted Europe’s empires of 1900. Unable to see that the age of naked conquest had come and gone, Japan intended to remake Asia in her own image. Her troops had ravaged China’s coast from Manchuria to the border of French Indochina. Her soldiers massacred, raped, tortured, and enslaved hundreds of thousands of Chinese and Koreans. Despite the backing of Stalin and Roosevelt, the two armies resisting the onslaught—the nationalist Kuomintang Army under Chiang Kai-shek, and Chinese communists under Mao Tse-tung—had been driven from the coast into China’s vast interior.

  To contain this new and violent empire, Roosevelt supplied Chiang with war loans and weapons. He shipped Lend-Lease materiel up the Burma Road to Chiang’s base at Kunming, and arranged for American volunteers recruited from the Army Air Corps to fly Tomahawk fighters against the Japanese from a British airfield in northern Burma.*9

  • • •

  To the Chinese, the Year of the Snake carries connotations of suspicion, distrust, and cunning. The year 1941—a year of many snakes—brought Tokyo and Washington to the crisis point. While Japan seethed over U.S. embargoes and demands to give up hard-won conquests in China, Roosevelt revealed his quiet loathing of the Emperor’s diplomats to journalist Quentin Reynolds. “They hate us,” he told Reynolds. “They come to me and they hiss between their teeth and they say, ‘Mr. President, we are your friends. Japan wants nothing but friendship with America,’ and then they hiss between their teeth again, and I know they’re lying. Oh, they hate us, and sooner or later they’ll come after us.”10

  Roosevelt’s scrap-metal embargo and the construction of a two-ocean Navy encouraged Japanese countermoves to seize oil, rubber, and minerals in the Dutch East Indies. When Roosevelt and his petroleum coordinator, Harold Ickes, found new ways of cutting exports to Japan without declaring a full-blown embargo—delaying export licenses, limiting port use, banning steel drum sales, and pulling tankers from the Pacific—planners at Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo grew thoroughly alarmed.

  A year earlier, FDR’s advisers had predicted that a threat to Japan’s economy could lead to war. Roosevelt’s aim, as Churchill put it, was to “keep that Japanese dog quiet.” But to keep the dog quiet, he would have to be firm, yet not so firm as to force Japan’s hand. Roosevelt was walking a thin, wobbling tightrope, and he did not know how far he would get before his foot slipped.11

  • • •

  Like the United States, Japan was unsure of herself. From their planning desks in Tokyo, the Emperor’s warlords saw two military options. First, Japan’s army in Manchuria could strike north, into Siberia, while the Red Army was fighting for its life near Moscow. Stalin’s forces were formidable, but his Far East army could not count on reinforcements from the overstretched Moscow front. A lightning blow might capture a buffer zone in Siberia, eliminate a traditional enemy, perhaps even force the collapse of Stalin’s government.

  Or Japan could strike south, into Indochina, the Dutch East Indies and Siam. This would leave the Emperor with an unsteady truce to the north, and probably war with the United States and Britain. But the payoff would be immense: Japan would have access to unlimited quantities of rubber, tin, oil, and rice.

  Although U.S. cryptographers had not yet unlocked Japanese naval codes, they were able to read signals between Tokyo’s foreign office and its embassies in Berlin and Washington. That intelligence gold mine gave Roosevelt important clues into the debate raging within the Emperor’s council, which was split between her Pacific-minded navy and Asian-minded army. As Roosevelt told Harold Ickes, “The Japs are having a real drag-down and knock-out fight among themselves . . . trying to figure out which way they are to jump.”12

  They jumped—or at least hopped—on July 17, when Hirohito’s government forced Vichy France to accept a joint protectorate over
French Indochina. Japanese warships occupied naval bases at Hanoi, Cam Ranh Bay, and Saigon, putting the Empire in position to attack Western possessions anywhere along the East Asian rim. The Philippines, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies watched anxiously as the katana blade was lifted, not knowing where it would fall next.13

  Roosevelt was furious. Without waiting for an “I told you so” from cabinet hawks like Ickes, he issued an executive order freezing Japanese currency in the United States. To buy more oil, Japan would have to apply for cash from the Foreign Funds Control Committee, headed by Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson. Acheson, influenced by Ickes, believed the Japanese dog would growl least if oil was tightened to an uncertain trickle, and as Roosevelt slipped off to Argentia to meet Churchill, Acheson suspended action by the Foreign Funds Control Committee on Japan’s requests until Roosevelt’s return—effectively imposing a month-long oil embargo.14

  •

  Looking ahead to a war that was growing more probable by the day, in the summer of 1941 the Joint Army-Navy Board prepared estimates of the manpower and equipment needed to defeat Germany and Japan. The “Victory Program,” as the collage of memoranda, tables, and appendices was nicknamed, assumed the United States would hold to a “Germany-first” strategy, that the Soviet Union would be defeated in mid-1942, and that the United States would be ready to invade Europe no earlier than July 1, 1943.

  The Victory Program forecast a ground force that would peak at 6.7 million men. The Air Forces would need 2 million additional men and 26,000 combat planes, while the Navy required 1.25 million men and 869 ships of various types. All told, Roosevelt’s war chiefs predicted the country would need to put 10.8 million men in uniform before the war was over.15

  Roosevelt knew that if the public peeled back the layers of this particular onion, it would be his eyes tearing up. His first thought, he told Stimson, was that the Joint Board estimates would ignite “a very bad reaction” if the public ever found out.

  In December, the public did find out, when the estimates were leaked to the Chicago Daily Tribune, Washington Times-Herald, and other newspapers owned by anti-Roosevelt partisans Robert McCormick and Cissy Patterson. On December 4 the McCormick-Patterson syndicate published an in-depth article on the Victory Program under the blazing headline “F.D.R.’S WAR PLANS!” The papers painted the assumptions as a countdown for war, and claimed, “July 1, 1943 is fixed as the date for the beginning of the final supreme effort by American land forces to defeat the mighty German army in Europe.”16

  Stimson was apoplectic when he read the story. “What do you think of the patriotism of a man or newspaper which would take these confidential studies and make them public to the enemies of this country?” he asked journalists at a press conference. At the White House, he told Roosevelt the story was probably a violation of the Espionage Act, a crime carrying the death penalty. He hoped some guilty McCormick employee would be found and put on trial, to “get rid of this infernal disloyalty we now have in America First and the McCormick family papers.” 17

  Roosevelt emphatically agreed, for Bertie McCormick and Cissy Patterson had been his most implacable critics in the press. He told Stimson they might be able to arrest those responsible for publication, but he wanted to make certain he was on solid legal ground first. He put J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation on the case, then turned back to the problems of the Far East.*18

  •

  The strain of dealing with a nation sliding into war ground at George Marshall’s soul. His regimented life required him to spare a few minutes each day to refresh his mind, but the ceaseless demands of the Army, the War Department, the White House, the British, the Chinese, the Russians, and Congress never left his mind. Each day brought new fires to put out, leaving Marshall with precious little time to focus on big questions like global strategy. “The Army used to have all the time in the world and no money,” he groaned. “Now we’ve got all the money and no time.”19

  One afternoon in late August, Marshall scrounged time for himself, when he and his wife, Katherine, took a rare retreat to their permanent home, a Leesburg, Virginia, brick house named Dodona Manor. It was the first time he had been home in three months, and his mission that day was to prune dead limbs from one of the apple trees scattered about his large yard.

  When he was not preparing for war in Asia or Europe, Marshall’s mind turned to gardening. He seeded his personal letters to family with references to lilacs, gardenias, roses, the condition of his oaks and elms, and his great pride, a compost heap that he turned religiously whenever he came home. On this inviting summer day, he had put his office in order long enough, he hoped, to give himself a few delicious moments to think about something other than war.

  A pruning saw in hand, he managed to climb into one tree and shimmy over to a dead limb before an aide called him to the telephone. A German U-boat had been spotted prowling the Caribbean, threatening Dutch oil refineries on Aruba and Curaçao with its deck gun.

  Marshall climbed down the tree and placed a call to the president at Hyde Park. When Roosevelt picked up, he asked the president to request permission from Holland’s Queen Wilhelmina to install coastal guns and an air base on her islands. Roosevelt agreed. Problem solved.

  He returned to his orchard, took up his pruning saw, and prepared to attack the dead branch again. He had not gone far up the tree before the aide returned: The president wanted more information about Aruba to give Queen Wilhelmina. Marshall climbed back down and dictated a cable that outlined the defense plan for Aruba.

  He hung up, picked up his saw, and walked back to the waiting tree. He was halfway through the necrotic limb when, once more, the aide called him to the phone. Now the War Department was on the line, looking for specific guidelines about Aruba’s coastal defense.

  Marshall stared heavily for a moment, then sighed, “Call for my car. I am leaving for Washington.”

  He motored back to Washington, back to the Munitions Building, back to the endless rows of unpruned trees waiting in his office. Aruba and Curaçao got their coastal guns, the German sub was chased off, and Marshall’s apple tree rode out the winter, a half-severed limb hanging lifelessly from its trunk.20

  TWELVE

  KIDO BUTAI

  AUTUMN 1941 FOUND AMERICA AND JAPAN WALTZING AROUND A BALLROOM laced with landmines. A secret request by Prince Konoye to meet with Roosevelt went unanswered—a victim of Hull, who wanted no meeting until all details had been worked out, and cabinet hawks, who wanted no discussions at all. Relations reached the breaking point in mid-October, when Japan’s hawks forced Konoye out of power and persuaded Emperor Hirohito to replace him with the fiery General Tojo.1

  FDR’s war council saw extremism spreading through the imperial cabinet, making war, in Stimson’s view, inevitable. “The Japanese Navy is beginning to talk almost as radically as the Japanese Army,” he told his diary. “We face the delicate question of the diplomatic fencing to be done so as to be sure that Japan was put into the wrong and made the first bad move—overt move.” The U.S. ambassador to Japan, Joseph Grew, warned Hull of a possible “all-out, do-or-die attempt, actually risking national hara-kiri, to make Japan impervious to economic embargoes abroad rather than yield to foreign pressure.”2

  • • •

  While no one knew where this do-or-die attempt would be aimed, one place seemed likely: the Philippine Islands. Lying astride Japan’s supply lines to the East Indies, the 1,500-island commonwealth begged for an attack by the Emperor’s powerful air and sea forces. Japan’s occupation of southern Indochina left the Philippines encircled on three sides, and in the event of war, U.S. naval plans assumed the Philippines would be lost. The plans called for the fleet to withdraw to Hawaii or British-held Singapore until the islands could be retaken, hopefully within six months. Until then, the Philippines would stand alone, and almost certainly fall alone.3

  Lieutenant General Douglas MacA
rthur, the U.S. military adviser to Manila since 1935, had been haranguing Washington for years to fund the territory’s defenses. Marshall, who had been stationed there as a young lieutenant, wanted to accommodate MacArthur, but by August 1941 the Commonwealth of the Philippines had just more than 22,000 men under arms, half of them enthusiastic but poorly equipped Filipino scouts. With Russia, Britain, China, and the Regular Army competing for a meager supply of weapons, the Philippines defenders had to do without.4

  They had, at least, one of America’s most distinguished generals to lead them. First in his class at West Point, Douglas MacArthur had built an unmatched reputation as commander of the Rainbow Division in World War I, superintendent of West Point, and the Army’s youngest chief of staff during the Hoover years. Now, at age sixty-one, his face still retained the handsome features of his youth. Vain and brilliant, brave and selfish, MacArthur exuded a personal magnetism that few other men possessed, and he won the admiration and confidence of both American and Filipino soldiers.

  His blind spot was civilian politics. As chief of staff under Hoover and FDR, he exceeded orders with the former and argued bitterly with the latter. He used brute force to eject protesting veterans during the Bonus March in 1932, earning the enmity of Washington’s newspapers. After Roosevelt shipped him off to Manila to become the U.S. military adviser there, MacArthur, basing his analysis on a poll of Reader’s Digest subscribers, confidently told the commonwealth’s president that Roosevelt would lose the 1936 election to Alf Landon. He retired from the Army the next year and assumed the rank of field marshal of the Filipino forces.

  Looking for some way to support the Philippines, in the summer of 1941 Marshall recommended MacArthur’s recall to active duty as commanding general of the U.S. Army Forces in the Far East, and he scheduled U.S. reinforcements for the Philippines, which hopefully would arrive on Luzon in mid-December. He also scraped together a few heavy bombers to threaten Japan’s sea-lanes, though without ample fighter and naval protection, long-range bombers would be a provocation more than a deterrent.5