The incident duly occurred on September 4, when the destroyer USS Greer, while making a mail run to Iceland, made sonar contact with a U-boat. Greer notified the British of the position and waited for British destroyers to show up. None appeared. Greer, meanwhile, dodged two torpedoes fired from the lurking U-boat, while the German sub dodged nineteen depth charges loosed by Greer. This potentially incendiary business on the seas ended with Greer and its crew steaming unscathed into port. Roosevelt seized the occasion on September 11 to deliver another of his fireside chats, one in which he brought America nearer to outright involvement in the European war. Declaring that Germany was guilty of an “act of piracy” in attacking Greer, he unleashed American ships and planes for offensive action. In waters “which we deem necessary for our defense,” he declared, “American naval vessels and American planes will no longer wait until Axis submarines lurking under the water, or Axis raiders on the surface of the sea, strike their deadly blow first.” They would shoot on sight. By moving the American defense zone even farther east, Roosevelt had, in effect, declared “undeclared war” in the mid-Atlantic. He then proclaimed—as he had to Churchill at Argentia—the right of U.S. ships to escort any nation’s ships, anywhere. Still, as he had in late April, he kept his warships out of the hottest battle zones—the Northwest Approaches, the Azores, and along the West African coast—where the dangers to British convoys bound from Britain around the Cape to the Middle East were greatest.357
“There has now come a time,” Roosevelt told his countrymen, “when you and I must see the cold inexorable necessity of saying to these inhuman, unrestrained seekers of world conquest and permanent world domination by the sword: ‘You seek to throw our children and our children’s children into your form of terrorism and slavery. You have now attacked our own safety. You shall go no further.’ ” The United States sought “no shooting war with Hitler,” he declared, “but neither do we want peace so much that we are willing to pay for it by permitting him to attack… our ships while they are on legitimate business.” To that end, he asked Congress to amend the Neutrality Acts such that merchantmen could be armed (cargo ships were at the time allowed to carry only a handgun and harpoons). He wanted those ships, once armed, to sail under the escort of U.S. warships. Congress acceded to Roosevelt’s wishes, in essence claiming sovereignty of the seas in America’s name, another virtual declaration of war. Such measures as Roosevelt proposed were costly, but America now spent willingly. The production decline of the first two quarters was reversed. By September, the U.S. government, not even at war, was plowing $1.8 billion per week into war production, more than was spent at the height of the Great War. With each new motion to Congress, with each new address to Americans, with each new contract let out for planes and tanks, Roosevelt edged closer to war, too close for the America Firsters, yet still not close enough for Churchill.358
On October 17 a second and far more serious incident than the Greer episode took place. That day, the destroyer USS Kearny, escorting a North Atlantic convoy, took a German torpedo in the side; eleven sailors belowdecks were killed. American blood had been spilled, but still Congress remained silent, and America remained at peace.
Then, on October 31, the old four-stack destroyer USS Reuben James, escorting a convoy south of Iceland, steamed into the crosshairs of a U-boat, which with two torpedoes sent Reuben James and 115 of its crew of 159 to the bottom. Here was the sort of incident that started wars. Churchill telegraphed Roosevelt his regrets: “I am grieved with loss of life you have suffered with Reuben James. I salute the land of unending challenge.” But the Reuben James was not to prove the Lusitania of World War Two. Churchill understood now that only an incident far greater than the sinking of a small warship—which had been sailing, after all, in harm’s way—would bring America into the war. He admitted as much when he told the War Cabinet the next day that Roosevelt faced “difficulties… as a result of the slow development of American opinion and the peculiarities of the American Constitution. Nobody but Congress could declare war. It was however in the president’s power to make war without declaring it.”359
Churchill knew after the Reuben James went down that this was a war America would declare on its own terms in its own time for its own reasons, or not declare at all. He thus advised his War Cabinet that “in the last twelve months American opinion had moved under his [Roosevelt’s] leadership to an extent nobody could have anticipated.” As well, he told the cabinet, the American “Navy was escorting the Atlantic convoys; and finally they were taking a firm line with the Japanese”—though a far less firm line than Roosevelt had promised at Argentia. Churchill said that it would “be a grave error on his part to press President Roosevelt to act in advance of American opinion.” Not only would it be a grave error to press Roosevelt, it would be futile. Americans and their president were not to be pressed. On several occasions Churchill voiced his preference to trade six months’ worth of supplies for an immediate declaration of war. He’d have to satisfy himself with the supplies, for he’d get no war from America, declared or undeclared, until America was willing.360
Roosevelt had injected for effect into his September 11 address a phrase that resonated with beer-and-a-shot Americans: “When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.” It was just the sort of turn of phrase, brash and dashing, that Churchill relished. Yet by November 1 the rattlesnake had struck repeatedly: USS Greer, Kearny, Reuben James. American sailors had drowned. Roosevelt’s threat had been cold and clear, but while his actions, in relation to his words, appeared to be ambiguous, they were not: America had been attacked and America had done nothing.361
Back in May, a few days after Bismarck went down, Churchill cabled his thanks to Roosevelt for declaring a state of emergency in the Atlantic and for his promise of shipping more matériel, on American ships, to the Middle East. Churchill concluded the cable with the arithmetic of battleships in the Atlantic: Britain and Germany had traded great ships, but Germany could not afford the trade. Elated over Bismarck’s demise, Churchill ended the telegram with a prediction: “The effect upon the Japanese will be highly beneficial. I expect they’re doing all their sums again.” In fact, the Japanese had been doing just that for quite some time.362
The previous year, Churchill (after the Americans declined his request to rattle their saber on his behalf in the Pacific) planned to send Hood and a squadron of cruisers and destroyers to Singapore in order to show the flag and give the Japanese something to think about. That option was now off the table; Hood was gone. In late October, to discourage any Japanese incursions westward toward Singapore or India, Churchill dispatched Prince of Wales to join the battle cruiser Repulse, already on station near Singapore. He informed Roosevelt of Prince of Wales’s mission, and outlined his Pacific strategy, such as it was: “This [Prince of Wales] ought to serve as a deterrent on Japan. There is nothing like having something that can catch and kill anything.”363
Churchill’s love of the Royal Navy betrayed his judgment. A 35,000-ton fast battleship couldn’t catch an airplane, and only with great shooting skill and good luck could it kill an airplane. Even after the British victory at Taranto, even after the disastrous attacks on Southampton and Illustrious, after the carnage inflicted by the Luftwaffe upon Cunningham’s fleet at Crete, Churchill could not concede that an airplane armed with just one torpedo or a single five-hundred-pound bomb might be able to kill his fast battleships. That an Asian race might accomplish such a feat did not square with his belief in the stature of Englishmen and their warships, and the importance of both in the orderly conduct of world affairs. Churchill “attributed to battleships,” recalled Ian Jacob, “a power… that they no longer retained.”364
Churchill was one in his thinking with the old admirals in the navies of the Western world—including the British Admiralty—for whom it was accepted fact that successfully dropping a bomb from several thousand feet onto the deck of a moving battleship was a
matter of chance. As for torpedoes, an aerial torpedo attack might prove dangerous on the open ocean, but in the navies of the world and among naval aviators it was accepted fact that in the shallow waters of anchorages, torpedo attacks were not possible. Torpedoes dropped from airplanes hit the water and descended more than one hundred feet before rising to running depth; when dropped into shallow harbors they simply buried themselves in the mud and posed no threat. Yet the British at Taranto the previous November had carried off just such an operation. In Japan, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and his naval aviation planners were duly impressed by the raid, and took note especially of the depth of the waters the British torpedoes had run in, just forty feet in places, shallower even than the waters of Pearl Harbor, home of the U.S. Pacific fleet. Some within the U.S. government grasped the turn taken by naval aviation at Taranto. Admiral Harold Stark, chief of naval operations, suggested to Admiral James Richardson, commander in chief of the U.S. fleet in Hawaii, that torpedo nets be strung at Pearl Harbor. Richardson, believing the nets would only get in the way of his ships, did not deploy them.365
Churchill, although he hadn’t learned the larger strategic lesson of Taranto, remained mindful of remote strategic possibilities—however remote in time, miles, or probability. He had asked Eden early in the year what was planned regarding the 22,000 Japanese-Canadians in British Columbia were Japan to attack the Empire. “The matter is of course for the Canadian government,” Churchill wrote, “but it would be interesting to know if adequate forces are available in that part of the Dominion. About thirty years ago, when there were anti-Japanese riots, the Japanese showed themselves so strong and so well organized as to be able to take complete control.” The sons and daughters of those immigrants had since grown to be loyal Canadian citizens; a young couple in Victoria, Mr. and Mrs. Hayashi, that very year named their newborn son Winston Churchill Hayashi. In asking what measures were in store for Canada’s Japanese, Churchill was a full ten months ahead of Roosevelt, who waited until late November to request from the U.S. Census Bureau the names and addresses of more than 125,000 Japanese-Americans—“Hitler’s little yellow friends,” Time called them—who lived on the American west coast.366
In Churchill’s estimation, no flank should remain unguarded. Yet when Ismay suggested reinforcing the garrison at Hong Kong, Churchill shot him down: “This is all wrong! If Japan goes to war with us, there is not the slightest chance of holding Hong Kong or relieving it.” Any imperial losses in the Pacific would be “dealt with at the Peace Conference after the war,” presumably won by Britain. When it came to planning for contingencies in the Pacific, Churchill tended to shoot wide of the mark. Weeks after his inquiry into the Canadian flank, he ordered Ismay to “report on the efficiency of the gunners and personnel managing the 15-inch gun batteries and searchlights at Singapore. Are they fitted with RDF [radar]?” The question implies that he assumed the Japanese would arrive by sea. Some tactical situations demand a creative, counterintuitive approach; this was one. Churchill should have followed up his question about the fifteen-inch guns by asking whether Japanese infantry could negotiate the supposed impenetrable jungle of the Malay Peninsula in order to attack Singapore from the landward side. In fact, the new commander in Singapore, Lieutenant General Arthur Ernest Percival, had ordered a study to ascertain whether Singapore could be “burgled by the back door” and concluded that the entire Malay Peninsula, almost three hundred miles in length, needed more airbases, more planes, more tanks, and more men. He was ignored by London; there were no resources to spare in any event. London settled upon a scorched-earth policy for Malaya; if the Japanese came by land, they would find it ravaged. Even were such a policy successfully implemented, the Malay Peninsula stretched like a welcoming gangplank, right up to the gunwales of Singapore island.367
On occasion Churchill’s strategic vision was distorted by his racial bias. When Harry Hopkins predicted in January that the incident that could spark U.S. involvement would be with Japan, Churchill replied that Tokyo must have been deterred by the demise at Taranto of the Italian fleet, which had appeared so strong on paper. “Fate holds terrible forfeits,” he told Hopkins, “for those who gamble on certainties.” Churchill believed, correctly, that the highest ranks of the Italian navy preferred to safeguard their fleets rather than fight with them. The Italians had paid for their caution when Churchill’s English sailors and fliers struck with the “bold strokes” he championed. He simply could not conceive of the Japanese employing similar bold strokes against American or British fleets. Yet the Japanese had indeed learned a lesson from Taranto, and they intended to apply it. As for the likelihood that Japan would unleash its forces on British interests, Churchill had told Ismay, “Japan will think long before declaring war on the British Empire.”368
In April, Japanese Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka visited Moscow with hopes of codifying a Russo-Japanese neutrality pact, which by virtue of both Matsuoka’s and Stalin’s total ignorance of Hitler’s looming treachery, it would be Matsuoka’s (and Stalin’s) good fortune to secure. Weeks earlier, Matsuoka had met with Hitler, who, along with Ribbentrop, planted broad hints that a Japanese adventure against Singapore might pay dividends to both Germany and Japan by virtue of dividing British forces and discouraging the Americans from coming in against either Germany or Japan. Ribbentrop dropped even heavier hints regarding the Führer’s designs on Russia, implying that if Japan tied down Stalin’s troops in far distant Asia, Germany could dispatch Russia, the traditional enemy of both Germany and modern Japan. But the Reich’s foreign minister, a plainspoken thug, failed to articulate his message in terms that a sophisticated diplomat might understand, thus sending Matsuoka to Moscow firm in the mistaken belief that Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union would for many years to come live together in peace, each pursuing empire after its own fashion.
On July 21, the Vichy government accepted Japanese demands for air and naval bases in the southern part of French Indochina. Four days later, Roosevelt announced an oil embargo against Japan to take effect August 1, together with a freeze of all bank transfers between the United States and Japan. An embargo on American scrap steel sales to Japan had gone into effect months earlier, too late for the Chinese killed over the last decade by Japanese shells and tanks that might as well have been stamped “Made in the USA” (the scrap steel also helped build Japan’s new navy). Great Britain followed America with similar measures the next day, and on July 26 the Dutch government in exile in London joined the embargo. Japan, if denied Dutch East Indian oil—some of it so pure it needed no refining—could not exploit its conquests or defend its empire. On Monday, July 28, Dutch authorities in Batavia (modern Jakarta) ordered a cessation of all trade with and payments to Japan. Two Japanese tankers that had just finished taking on oil at Tarakan Island were allowed to leave. An American diplomat offered that the oil gauge and the clock now stood side by side; each drop in the level of Japanese oil brought nearer the hour of decision.369
In November 1940, secret and informal talks among the British, Australian, and Dutch had begun in Singapore with the intent of drawing up plans for a response to German raiders in the Pacific or to a Japanese attack. Previous contacts among the parties treated of the usual humdrum issues pertinent to powers in close proximity to one another, mostly how to stay out of one another’s way. A second meeting had taken place in Batavia and was followed by a third in Singapore in February 1941, in which U.S. military personnel were present as “observers.” At the next conference, in April, the Americans became full participants. Yet by mid-November 1941—after a full year of parleys—the talks had failed utterly to produce any plan to respond to Japanese aggression. The conferees did agree on one point: the need for reconnaissance flights in order to track Japanese naval movements in the South China Sea. The flights yielded nothing. No plan was ever produced to act in unison in the event of a Japanese attack, whether surprise or otherwise.
Dutch East Indian oil, Burmese rice, and Malayan tin and ru
bber were Japan’s ultimate objectives, but to gain them, they had to locate and destroy the American and British Pacific fleets. The location of the former was easy to ascertain; in late November the American fleet rode peacefully at anchor at Pearl Harbor. Locating the British fleet was easy as well, because there was no British fleet to speak of. With ongoing losses in the Mediterranean, the British could not maintain in Asia any concentration of sea power that could fairly be called a fleet.
When it came to the prospect of war in the Pacific, Churchill’s thinking throughout 1941, except for the final three weeks of the year, was sometimes contradictory and often naive. He admitted as much in his memoirs when he wrote, “I do not pretend to have studied Japan, ancient or modern, except as presented to me by newspapers and a few books.” Yet he was one with Bismarck, who admonished statesmen to imagine themselves in the position of their enemy, “The Other Man.” To be effective, such an imaginative leap into the mind and motives of an opponent requires knowledge. Churchill never lacked imagination, but when it came to Japan, he lacked knowledge. As well, as a Victorian gentleman, he thought little of the brown races, the black, and the yellow.370
He knew just enough to know that he didn’t want a fight with Japan. A year earlier he had told Roosevelt that were the Japanese to thrust toward Singapore or the Dutch East Indies, “We have today no forces in the Far East capable of dealing with this situation should it develop.” Months earlier he had told the cabinet that a Japanese attack on the Dutch colonies “would mean war with us.” He did not believe they stood a good chance of beating the Japanese, and he told Ismay so. But, as with Greece, they might have to fight over a point of honor. To not contest a Japanese takeover of Dutch possessions would amount to “allowing ourselves to be cut off from Australia and New Zealand, and they would regard our acquiescence as desertion.” Yet he didn’t see the Japanese precipitating such a crisis. He had told Hopkins early in the year that if faced with the prospects of armed Anglo-American resistance, the Japanese would not come in. He clung to that opinion, despite the fact that Hopkins told him quite clearly that America would very likely not go to war with Japan over Dutch interests, or British. During an April War Cabinet meeting, Churchill expressed doubt that Japan would enter the war unless Hitler successfully invaded Britain. In cabinet memos to the Chiefs of Staff and Eden, Churchill claimed the Japanese would be “most unlikely to come in if they thought that by doing so they would bring in the United States.” In July he reiterated his April assessment: “I must repeat my conviction that Japan will not declare war upon us at the present juncture, nor if the United States enters the war on our side.” And, if Japan acted upon Hitler’s suggestions and attacked British Asian possessions, Churchill “felt sure the United States would declare war.”371
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