A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror
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On the other side of the argument were a few outright loonies, of course, including discredited socialists, and the entire front for the American Communist Party. The American Peace Mobilization Committee, for example, had peace marches right up to the day that Hitler invaded the USSR, when signs protesting American involvement in the war were literally changed on the spot to read open the second front!46 Where five minutes earlier American communists had opposed American involvement, once Stalin’s bacon was in the fire they demanded U.S. intervention.
Besides these fringe groups, however, were millions of well-intentioned Americans who sincerely wanted to avoid another European entanglement. Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, Republican of Michigan, aptly expressed the views of the vast majority of so-called isolationists when he wrote in his diary, “I hate Hitlerism and Naziism and Communism as completely as any person living. But I decline to embrace the opportunist idea…that we can stop these things in Europe without entering the conflict with everything at our command…. There is no middle ground. We are either all the way in or all the way out.”47
Indeed, the dirty little secret of the prewar period was that polls, when not doctored by the British, showed that most Americans agreed with aviator Charles Lindbergh’s antiwar position. A few months later, in February 1941, the “Lone Eagle” testified before Congress about his firsthand inspection of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. Roosevelt, convinced the aviator was attempting to undermine his Lend-Lease program, launched a campaign through subordinates to convince Americans that Lindbergh was a Nazi.48 The entire saga showed how far the corruption of Hitler, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, and Soviet communism had spread: the British conducted widespread spying and manipulations inside the borders of their closest ally; an American hero was tarred with the appellation Nazi for holding a position different from the president’s about the best way to defeat the Nazis; and the Roosevelt administration increasingly had to accommodate an utterly evil Stalinist regime in Russia for the sole reason that the Soviets were fighting the Nazis.
Roosevelt, then, governed a nation that wanted to remain out of the conflict, yet despised the Axis and possessed deep sympathies for the English. Public attitudes required a clear presentation of both the costs of involvement and the dangers of neutrality, but FDR’s foreign policy appointees lacked the skill to deal with either the British or the Axis.
In that context, by 1940 the isolationists certainly had drifted into a never-never land of illusion, thereby risking essential strategic advantages that, if conceded, could indeed have threatened the U.S. mainland. Isolationists, unfortunately, probably had a point when they complained that the French and Belgians “deserved” their fate. As Nazi tanks rolled over Europe, one European countess lamented that “these European peoples themselves have become indifferent to democracy…. I saw that not more than ten percent of the people on the European continent cared for individual freedom or were vitally interested in it to fight for its preservation.”49
Yet in many ways, the only difference between the French and the isolationist Americans, who obsessed about the depressed economy, was one of geography: France was “over there,” with Hitler, and Americans were not—yet. Thus, Roosevelt’s dilemma lay in controlling the British covert agents (whose methods were illegal and repugnant, but whose cause was just) while preparing the reluctant public for an inevitable war and demonstrating that the isolationists had lost touch with strategic reality (without questioning their patriotism or motives)—all the while overcoming ambassadorial appointees who sabotaged any coherent policies.
In any event, he had a responsibility to rapidly upgrade the military by using the bully pulpit to prepare Americans for war. Instead, he chose the politically expedient course. He rebuilt the navy—a wise policy—but by stealth, shifting NIRA funds and other government slush money into ship construction. The United States took important strategic steps to ensure our sea-lanes to Britain, assuming control of Greenland in April 1941 and, three months later, occupying Iceland, allowing the British garrison there to deploy elsewhere. But these, and even the shoot-on-sight orders given to U.S. warships protecting convoys across half of the Atlantic, never required the voters to confront reality, which Roosevelt could have done prior to Pearl Harbor without alienating the isolationists. By waiting for the public to lead on the issue of war, Roosevelt reaped the worst of all worlds: he allowed the British to manipulate the United States and at the same time failed to prepare either the military or the public adequately for a forthcoming conflict. In 1939 he had argued forcefully for a repeal of the arms embargo against Britain, and he won. But a month later FDR defined the combat zone as the Baltic and the Atlantic Ocean from Norway to Spain. In essence, Roosevelt took American ships off any oceans where they might have to defend freedom of the seas, handing a major victory to the isolationists. He also delayed aid to Finland, which had heroically tried to hold off the giant Soviet army in the dead of winter, until a large chunk of that nation had fallen under Soviet tyranny.
In short, the Roosevelt war legacy is mixed: although he clearly (and more than most American political leaders) appreciated the threat posed by Hitler, he failed to mobilize public opinion, waiting instead for events to do so. He never found the Soviets guilty of any of the territorial violations that he had criticized. Just as the war saved Roosevelt from a final verdict on the effectiveness of his New Deal policies, so too did Pearl Harbor ensure that history could not effectively evaluate his wartime preparations oriented toward the Atlantic. One could say the Roosevelt legacy was twice saved by the same war.
Reelection and Inevitability
Roosevelt kept his intentions to run for reelection a secret for as long as he could. Faced with the war in Europe, FDR had decided to run, but he wanted his candidacy to appear as a draft-Roosevelt movement. He even allowed a spokesman to read an announcement to the Democratic National Committee stating that he did not want to run. It was grandstanding at its worst, but it had the desired result: echoes of “We want Roosevelt” rang out in the convention hall. The “draft” worked, and FDR selected Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture and a man to the left of Roosevelt, as a new vice president. Against the incumbent president, the Republicans nominated Wendell Willkie, chief executive of the Commonwealth and Southern Corporation, a utility company. Willkie, in addition to being a businessman, was also an Indiana lawyer and farmer, owning “two farms he actually farmed,” in contrast to the country squire Roosevelt.50 Willkie actually managed to gain some traction against Roosevelt on the economic front, arguing that the New Deal had failed to eliminate mass unemployment; still later, he tried to paint FDR as a warmonger. Without a clear vision for a smaller-state America, Willkie was doomed. In the reelection, Roosevelt racked up another electoral college victory with a margin of 449 to 82, but in the popular vote, the Republicans narrowed the margin considerably, with 22 million votes to FDR’s 27 million. Once again the Democrats controlled the big cities with their combination of political machines and government funds.
In charging Roosevelt with desiring war, Willkie failed to appreciate the complex forces at work in the United States or the president’s lack of a well-thought-out strategy. Throughout 1939–40, Roosevelt seemed to appreciate the dangers posed by the fascist states, though never Japan. However, he never made a clear case for war with Germany or Italy, having been lulled into a false sense of security by the Royal Navy’s control of the Atlantic. When he finally did risk his popularity by taking the case to the public in early 1940, Congress gave him everything he asked for and more, giving lie to the position that Congress wouldn’t have supported him even if he had provided leadership. Quite the contrary: Congress authorized 1.3 million tons of new fighting ships (some of which went to sea at the very time Japan stood poised to overrun the Pacific), and overall Congress voted $17 billion for defense. The president appointed two prominent Republicans to defense positions, naming Henry Stimson as secretary of war and Frank Knox as secretary of the navy. Bo
th those men advocated much more militant positions than did Roosevelt, favoring, for example, armed escorts for U.S. shipping to Britain.
One sound argument for giving less aid to England did emerge. American forces were so unprepared after a decade’s worth of neglect that if the United States energetically threw its military behind England (say, by sending aircraft and antiaircraft guns), and if, despite the help, the British surrendered, America would be left essentially defenseless. Only 160 P-40 War Hawks were in working order, and the army lacked antiaircraft ammunition, which would not be available for six more months. Advisers close to Roosevelt glumly expected Britain to fall.
Hitler’s massive air attacks on England, known as the Battle of Britain, began in July 1940 to prepare for Germany’s Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of England. Use of radar, combined with Churchill’s timely attacks on Germany by long-range bombers, saved the day. By October, the Royal Air Force had turned back the Luftwaffe, but Britain remained isolated, broke, and under increasing danger of starvation because of U-boat attacks on merchant vessels. At about the time the British had survived Germany’s aerial attacks, Mussolini attempted to expand the southern front by invading Greece. With British support, the Greeks repulsed the Italians; Britain then counterattacked in Africa, striking at the Italian forces in Libya. Mussolini’s foolishness brought the Nazi armies into North Africa, and with great success at first. General Erwin Rommel took only eleven days to defeat the British and chase them back to Egypt. Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete also fell, joining Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria under German rule.
At that point, during a critical juncture in world history, two factors made American intervention to save Britain unnecessary in military terms and yet critical in the long run for stabilizing Western Europe for decades. First, following a November 1940 raid by the Royal Navy, the Italian fleet at Taranto had to withdraw to its ports, ceding sea control of the Mediterranean to the British. This made it difficult, though not impossible, for Hitler to consider smashing the British ground troops in Egypt and marching eastward toward India, where he entertained some thoughts of linking up with the Japanese. As long as the British had free reign of the Mediterranean, however, resupply of such an effort would have to be conducted overland. This prospect led to the second critical development, Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. In part, the Soviet invasion was inevitable in Hitler’s mind. Since Mein Kampf, he had clung to the notion that Poland and western Russia represented the only hope for Germany’s “overpopulation” (in his mind).
As a result, when the bombs fell in Hawaii on December 7, 1941, the shocking unpreparedness of American forces and the disastrous defeat at Pearl Harbor provided just enough evidence for critics of the president to claim that he had what he had wanted all along, a war in Europe through the back door of Asia. Here the critics missed the mark: FDR had had no advance warning about Pearl Harbor. Nevertheless, his unwillingness to stand clearly in favor of rebuilding the military at the risk of losing at the ballot box ensured that, despite Roosevelt’s otherwise good inclinations, somewhere, at some time, U.S. military forces would take a beating.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Democracy’s Finest Hour, 1941–45
Democracy in Peril
World War II presented an unparalleled challenge to the United States because, for the first time, two capable and determined enemies faced America simultaneously. These foreign enemies were not merely seeking to maintain colonial empires, nor were they interested in traditional balance-of-power concerns. They were, rather, thoroughly and unmistakably evil foes. Nazi Germany had the potential technological capability to launch devastating attacks on the American mainland. The Empire of Japan had gained more territory and controlled more people in a shorter time than the Romans, the Mongols, or the Muslim empires.
Also for the first time, the United States had to fight with a true coalition. Unlike World War I, when Americans were akin to modern free agents entering the war at the last minute, the United States was allied with England, France, and Russia. The USSR was the dominant power west of the Urals, and the United States was instantly accorded the role of leadership on the Western Front. Although America was substantially free from enemy attack (aside from Pearl Harbor), the conflict brought the nation closer to a total-war footing than at any other time in its history. But as in previous wars, the business leaders of the country again took the lead, burying the Axis powers in mountains of planes, ships, tanks, and trucks. Emerging from the war as the world’s dominant power, imbued with both military force and moral certainty of cause, the United States stood firm in democracy’s finest hour.
“The Americans Will Be Overawed”
“Blitzkrieg,” or lightning war, became a familiar word as the Nazi panzer (tank) armies slashed through Poland in 1939, then France in 1940. Technically a tactic (a method to obtain an objective), blitzkrieg also constituted a strategy, that is, a large sweeping plan for victory in war. Few recognized in 1941 that both Germany and Japan had adopted blitzkrieg because of the perception that without access to vital oil supplies, they would quickly lose, but Germany had slashed through to the Caucasus oil reserves in southern Russia, and Japan had seized oil-rich Indonesia.
There were key differences in the two foes, though. Germany’s productive industry and technological capabilities might have sustained her for several years. Japanese planners harbored no such illusions about their chances of success. Admiral Nagano Osami, who had strongly supported war with America well before the Pearl Harbor plan was formulated, grimly promised to “put up a tough fight for the first six months,” but if the war went for two or three years he had “no confidence” in Japan’s ability to win.1 Just two months before Pearl Harbor, Nagano again said that the imperial navy could hold its own for about two years; other voices in the military thought a year was more realistic. Asked point-blank if Japan could win a quick-strike war similar to the Russo-Japanese War nearly forty years earlier, Nagano stated flatly that “it was doubtful whether we could even win,” let alone come close to the success of 1904.2 But the army dictated strategy, and the Bushido warrior code, combined with the assassination of dissenters, sealed Japan’s doom. In retrospect, Japan essentially marched grimly into a disaster with most of its leaders fully aware that, even with extreme luck, victory was next to impossible.
By 1939, Japan’s army had already wallowed for three years in China, helping itself to Chinese resources. Despite the fact that China, a pitiful giant, was too divided among feuding factions and too backward to resist effectively, Japan had trouble subduing the mainland. By 1940, the Japanese occupied all the major population centers with a ruthlessness resembling that of the Nazis, yet they still could not claim total victory. Imperial policy exacted great costs. In July 1939 the United States revoked the most-favored-nation trading status provided by a commercial treaty of 1911, and a month later, in a dispute little noticed in the West, the Soviets defeated Japanese troops in Mongolia.
Japan’s China policy stemmed in part from the perverse power of the military in a civilian government on the home islands, where any civilian or military leaders who interfered with the expansionism of the army or navy were muffled or assassinated. Yet for all their recklessness, many in the empire’s inner circle viewed any strategy of engaging the United States in a full-scale war as utter lunacy. One logistics expert starkly laid out production differentials between America and Japan: steel, twenty to one; oil, one hundred to one; aircraft, five to one; and so on. His arguments fell on deaf ears. By 1940, no Japanese official openly criticized the momentum toward war. The American-educated Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto came the closest to outright opposition. He had flown across the United States once and soberly observed America’s awesome productive capability. His visit to Dayton’s Wright Field, while opening his imagination to the potential for long-range air strikes, also reminded him of the vast gulf between the two nations. When he raised such concerns with the imperial warlords, they
transferred him to sea duty.
Military ascendancy was complete by October 1941, when Japan installed as prime minister General Hideki Tojo, known to the British press as the Razor. A stubborn, uncompromising man, Tojo’s ascension to power essentially ended all hopes of a diplomatic solution to the Asian situation. Tojo became enamored of a quick knockout blow to the United States, advocating a strike in which “the Americans [would] be so overawed from the start as to cause them to shrink from continuing the war. Faced with [the destruction of ] their entire Pacific fleet in a single assault delivered at a range of over three thousand miles, they would be forced to consider what chance there would be of beating this same enemy [across] an impregnable ring of defensive positions.”3