1944
Page 6
When Great Britain declared war on Germany, followed by France five hours later, Roosevelt took to the airwaves in a fireside chat, and said: “This nation will remain a neutral nation, but I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought as well. Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts.” And though he told Congress in a personal address, “Our acts must be guided by one single hardheaded thought—keeping America out of war,” he emphasized the urgency of repealing the Neutrality Act so that America could provide military support to the western Allies. (Congress responded by authorizing a so-called cash-and-carry plan, which allowed American manufacturers to sell arms to Britain and France so long as each country paid cash and sent its own ships to pick up the goods.)
Still, neutrality had a high price. The war news haunted Roosevelt. While poring over cables from abroad, or reading his morning New York Times and the Herald Tribune, he would mutter to himself over and over, “All bad, all bad.” The first president to use the phone extensively—Harry Truman recalled how Roosevelt’s voice boomed so loudly he had to hold the phone away from his ear—he often spoke to his emissaries in Europe or aides in the State Department. Day-in and day-out, the phone rang constantly, bringing him the latest news of Hitler’s feints and moves. Then his days were filled with meetings: with the press, with the secretaries of state and the treasury, with the attorney general, with his personal secretary for afternoon dictation, and ever more frequently with senior members of the Senate. Invariably, Fridays were cabinet days, when the president met with the members who had the greatest political weight or the greatest measure of influence.
Predictably, he craved diversion where he could find it—in his nightly rubdown with masseur George Fox, in his collection of stamps and cherished naval prints, in his beloved tree plantings, in his frequent naps, in the movies he was “addicted to,” and most of all in the cocktail hour that took place every afternoon at the White House, when he banished all talk of war and busied himself with mixes and shakers. But none of this was ever quite refuge enough.
“I’m almost literally walking on eggs,” Roosevelt confessed early in 1940. The strain showed. The president’s blood pressure shot up to 179/102. Then came a scare: one evening in February, during an intimate dinner with Ambassador Bullitt and the close presidential aide Missy LeHand, Roosevelt collapsed at the table—it was a small heart attack, which his longtime attending navy physician, Admiral Ross McIntire, quickly dismissed and hushed up.
AS SPRING APPROACHED, THE United States made one last-ditch effort to forestall all-out war. In March, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, a close adviser to the president, traveled to London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome to propose a plan of peace and security through disarmament. In hindsight, the proposal reeked of desperation. At the time, the Germans were scornful and the British were horrified. As the world watched, the United States seemed to be doing little more than awaiting Hitler’s next move.
It would not have to wait long.
On May 10, 1940, Hitler launched his now infamous blitzkrieg—lightning war—against the Netherlands and Belgium, ravaging them by land and air. On day four of the German advance, Hitler ordered the old Dutch city of Rotterdam destroyed not for military reasons but for Schrecklichkeit (“frightfulness”)—the explicit use of terror to break a people’s will to resist. After a day of ferocious bombing, some thirty thousand people lay dead beneath the rubble. Hours later, the Dutch surrendered unconditionally, and the Belgians followed within two weeks.
Then Hitler, unencumbered, turned his full force on France. Protected by Stuka dive-bombers, Nazi tanks and motorized infantry ripped through the Ardennes virtually unopposed, and Erwin Rommel’s notorious panzers rapidly reached the Channel coast. In World War I, movement of the battle lines was often measured in yards rather than miles, and the French and British had managed to hold back German thrusts for four ghastly years, despite the carnage and millions of casualties. This time, the French, considered to have the best army in the world, were dumbstruck. They were overrun and had hardly fired a shot.
Churchill urgently cabled to Roosevelt: “The scene has darkened swiftly. The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like match wood. We expect to be attacked ourselves.” Privately, Roosevelt told his aides that if Great Britain fell, the United States would “be living at the point of a gun.” The question for Roosevelt, however, and for the world, was this: was he willing to publicly rally the nation to brave the German fury? His answer was silence.
Within weeks, German panzer units had trapped the British expeditionary force and the French First Army along the harsh English Channel on the French beach at Dunkirk. While the German officers waited for Hitler’s final orders to annihilate the British, about 338,000 English and French troops escaped in an armada of small fishing boats and other craft, leaving behind nearly 2,500 guns and 76,000 tons of ammunition. Half of the British naval fleet, including its destroyers, had been sunk or damaged, and now England, fearing the worst, braced itself for an attack. Expecting the Germans to follow his troops across the Channel, Churchill proposed laying poison gas along England’s southern beaches to try to thwart the Nazi forces at the shore.
Then on June 5, German forces prepared to turn south. At the Somme, the French line crumpled before the onslaught of German panzers. Four days later, the Germans crossed the Seine, facing only token resistance. On June 14, the unthinkable happened: Paris itself fell. France was now finished, and its tattered government hastily retreated to Bordeaux. An armistice was signed on June 22, ceding a vast part of France to the Germans. The south of France remained in the hands of a puppet government in the resort town of Vichy. Meanwhile, the countryside was filled with refugees—and littered with corpses and the abandoned carts and luggage of the dead. Moreover, the Germans held 2 million French POWs.
In one audacious stroke, Hitler had outdone Kaiser Wilhelm and Napoleon: he had managed to sever the alliance of his enemies, drive Britain from the European continent, all but destroy the French army, and rewrite the Treaty of Versailles. Germany had either bullied its enemies or smashed them with its blitzkrieg. And its constellation of military forces was now feared from the Caspian Sea to the English Channel.
In vain, Great Britain sought to involve the United States. On the morning of May 15 the French premier, Paul Reynaud, telephoned the newly installed British prime minister, Winston Churchill, at 7:30 to convey, in English, a grim message: “We are defeated. We have lost the battle.” Churchill had been imploring Roosevelt to help. The prime minister’s immediate reply to Reynaud was: be steadfast; hang on until the United States joins the fray. Churchill then cabled to Roosevelt, saying, “The voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long.” Roosevelt did promptly ask Congress to agree to spend $1.2 billion more on defense in order to build more planes and to increase production facilities. He would also ask for another $1.9 billion a few weeks later. But for the moment, that was all. There would be no troopships of American forces, no public threats, and most critically, no declaration of war. In the days surrounding the fall of Paris, both a frantic Reynaud and Churchill made desperate, last-second pleas to Roosevelt to intervene. Where, they asked, was the might of the United States? In private, Roosevelt offered support, but in public the official American response remained a noncommittal, stony silence. It had become every country for itself.
AT THE OUTSET OF World War I, England’s secretary of state for foreign affairs, Sir Edward Grey, had lamented, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” This, of course, was before America’s entry into the first Great War. Now, it was as if history were tragically repeating itself, as one European nation after another was conquered by a rapacious Germany, and as America remained absent. In truth, militarily Roosevelt was hamstrung: far from being a powerhouse, his army was ranked eighteenth in the world, and he commanded not millions of battle-hardened troops like Hitler�
�s, but a pathetic number of men—only about 185,000—many of whom trained with fake wooden rifles. Despite his plan for a large expansion of American airpower, his air forces were outdated and almost nonexistent. The navy was little better. And at one point, Roosevelt reviewed a contingent of national guardsmen training, their brightly colored regimental banners streaming in the wind. They drilled with broomsticks instead of machine guns, raced around in trucks instead of tanks, and were so out of shape that many collapsed from heat and exhaustion during the maneuvers.
Politically, the situation was equally desperate. On the heels of the Depression, Roosevelt had kept defense spending at minimal levels, even though a belligerent Third Reich was violating pact after pact and arming itself to the teeth. By 1940, the American nation remained in the grip of isolationism, and because that was an election year, Roosevelt was unwilling to muster his considerable persuasive powers to prompt an early American entry into the war. So as the summer of 1940 arrived, Britain stood alone, Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented third term on an antiwar plank, and the Nazis were unopposed wherever they went.
THE CONTRAST BETWEEN ROOSEVELT, appealing to the American people for a third term with pledges to keep the nation out of war, and a jubilant Adolf Hitler in Berlin could not have been more striking. Nor could the tenor of the two men have been more stridently at odds. For Hitler, at the pinnacle of his power, anything and everything now seemed possible. When he toured the deserted streets of a defeated Paris—Nazi loudspeakers had warned all the residents to remain indoors—it was a visit to the tomb of Napoleon that most seemed to captivate the Führer. First he slapped his thighs giddily, followed by a prolonged pause, and then total silence. Standing before the remains of the emperor, the Führer was transfixed.
The German people felt much the same about Hitler. On July 6, he returned to Berlin and was welcomed as if he were a victorious Roman emperor. By the time his train pulled into the station at three o’clock, hundreds of thousands of well-wishers had lined the streets all the way to the Reich Chancellery. The roads themselves were strewn with flowers, and huge crowds of storm troopers shouted, “Sieg heil! Sieg heil! SIEG HEIL!” The sun shone brilliantly, and the people, cheering themselves hoarse and delirious with war fever, called again and again for Hitler to come out onto his balcony. Time after time he did. Hitler was now, one of his generals insisted, “the greatest warlord of all time.” Little wonder that Hitler believed it was just a matter of time before Britain itself would fall or sue for peace. And little wonder too that he audaciously began to contemplate a final showdown with the Soviet Union in the fall, a titanic battle that would demolish Bolshevism. It would be, Hitler remarked, “child’s play,” another “lightning war.” And, the Führer reasoned, if Russia was routed, “Britain’s last hope would be shattered.”
Until that moment arrived, Hitler remained content to smash Great Britain from the air.
Throughout August and September successive waves of German fighters took to the skies to bomb England into submission. The Luftwaffe had first sought to blast the Royal Air Force from the air, but the British fought back with everything they could: in a series of dramatic dogfights over the Channel coast and the cities of southern England, the RAF pilots went wing to wing against the Nazi fliers. With America on the sidelines, England’s survival had now depended on these close-combat dogfights. When the Germans failed to annihilate the British air force, they then launched a terror-bombing campaign. Thus began the epic Battle of Britain.
Initially, the Germans had targeted ports, radar stations, airfields, and communication facilities. Then the Luftwaffe shifted to nighttime bombing and unleashed as many as a thousand planes a night. German bombs lit up London’s East End and then London itself for fifty-seven consecutive nights. When they attacked the city of Coventry, most of its ancient churches were reduced to rubble, and so were seventy thousand homes. The RAF retaliated in kind, bombing Berlin. Hitler angrily announced, “If they attack our cities, we will simply rub out theirs.” In response, Churchill said of Hitler, “This wicked man, this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame, has now resolved to break our famous island race by process of indiscriminate slaughter.” His jaw jutting, the prime minister boldly promised, “We can take it.” England did, but it wasn’t easy.
The damage was unprecedented. Ten thousand lay dead, and more than fifty thousand were injured. In the German raid on the manufacturing city of Birmingham, more than 1,300 people were killed in a single evening. Buildings were reduced to charred skeletons; vast craters were left in the city streets. Children were fitted with gas masks. And night after night as the lights were extinguished across the city, some 177,000 Londoners took to makeshift bomb shelters in the stations of the city’s famous Underground. Soon, the ground would shake and the sky would be ablaze, as firemen rushed to douse the walls of flame. Once day broke, weary citizens would stumble out from their subterranean world and gaze anew at another round of devastation.
Steadfast, impatient, fretful, Churchill himself would frequently make his way out from the cavernous yellow chamber where he met with aides and would hike up the stairs to a roof when he heard heavy bombing. There, clad in a thick siren suit and steel helmet, gas mask at the ready, he munched restlessly on a tired cigar and watched as his beloved London burned.
But come daylight, tens of thousands of tiny Union Jacks still flapped defiantly in the breeze from the windows of Londoners’ houses—that is, those situated beyond the wreckage. “How much they can stand, I don’t know,” CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow reported in his sonorous voice. “The strain is very great.” Yet the British gave as much as they got. Churchill was right; his people could take it. And they managed to inflict extensive losses on the Wehrmacht as well. By late fall, a stymied Hitler had decided that the key to winning the war lay not in the west, but in the east. He indefinitely shelved Operation Sea Lion, the Nazis’ planned naval assault on Great Britain across the English Channel, and began to set his sights on invading the Soviet Union—a nation with which he had a nonaggression pact. The consequences would be fateful for the war, for the people of Europe, and eventually for the United States.
And though this was unknown at the time, also for the increasingly embattled Jews of Europe.
WHILE ROOSEVELT WAS STILL groping for a grand strategy, Hitler was finally settling on his own. Having achieved nearly total domination in the west, he now planned to attack eastward. He picked June 1941 to begin. He expected the battle to be over by the first frost.
Upon receiving word of the attack against the Soviet Union, Winston Churchill immediately sided with Stalin. And with impressive foresight, Roosevelt extended to the Soviet Union the ever-increasing quantity of American arms and supplies being sent to the Allied powers fighting against the Nazis. But for nearly six months, only two nations were at war with Germany. That would change after December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked and America finally entered the war. Suddenly, there were three: Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and now the United States.
ROOSEVELT AS COMMANDER IN chief was both a feast of a character and a massive riddle of a man. To be sure, not everyone loved the American president. “God damn Roosevelt!”—that was the least of what his critics said. Throughout the war, the genial president was castigated as a tyrant and a “paralytic cripple,” as a fabricator of bogus promises and a dictator thirsting for global control, as a “Don Quixote of the present century living in his dreams” and as a feeble politician with a “warped” brain. Among wartime presidents, only Lincoln was as castigated.
While preaching freedom abroad, long after the direst days of the Depression, he also had to weather his own mounting problems at home. For example, in the summer of 1943 a simple fistfight in a remote corner of a Detroit park quickly escalated, prompting spasms of racial violence and race riots across the country. National morale was battered. “The whole world is watching our domestic problems,” the New York Times direly reported.
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bsp; In the meantime, the business of war was ceaseless. A never-ending parade of problems, appeals, complaints, and queries flowed into the Oval Office. Cartoonists lampooned the president’s indecision and ridiculed him for allowing the nation to be so buffeted mercilessly. Yet against all this, against all the nagging policy disputes and temporary military failures, Roosevelt invariably retained his grace. Where an exhausted Abraham Lincoln had morosely wandered the halls of the White House muttering to himself, “I must have relief from this anxiety or it will kill me,” and a disgusted George Washington resorted to invective against his political enemies, Roosevelt continued to display good humor and aplomb. It is little wonder that one of Roosevelt’s political opponents wrote, “We, who hate your gaudy guts, salute you.”
Roosevelt as chief executive remained a puzzle to friends and foes alike. This suited him just fine. He always grasped the symbolism of governance. Thus he spoke to blacks at Howard University, to foreigners at the Statue of Liberty, to the nation from his fireside. Often he acted not by following any grand design but by sheer instinct, hastily improvising makeshift arrangements. One of his greatest accomplishments, the Lend-Lease plan to keep Great Britain viable militarily after 1940, he devised on board a yacht while sailing the Caribbean. It was pure genius, a masterstroke. Under that benign name—Lend-Lease—Roosevelt created a mechanism to sidestep the entire government apparatus and open up the United States’ military arsenal in the simple guise of a short-term loan between allies and international friends. Then he sold it, to the American people and to the Congress, genially and cheerily, but all the while never giving an inch of ground.