1944

by Jay Winik

  “Our national policy is not directed toward war,” he continued. “Its sole purpose is to keep war away from our country.” And then came one of the most memorable phrases of his presidency, or any presidency: “We must be the great Arsenal of Democracy! For us this is an emergency as serious as war itself.” With great flair—this was a speech that had gone through seven drafts—Roosevelt continued. Americans must show “the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same spirit of patriotism and sacrifice as we would show were we at war.” And for those who thought he displayed a callous indifference to Europe’s suffering, he continued: “The history of recent years proves that the shootings and the chains and the concentration camps are not simply the transient tools but the very altars of modern dictatorships. They may talk of a ‘new order’ in the world, but what they have in mind is only a revival of the oldest and the worst tyranny.” He ended with an equally eloquent injunction for the United States to undertake “the mightiest production effort” in its history. “I call for it in the name of this nation which we love and honor, in which we are privileged and proud to serve.”

  That same evening, the Nazis were firebombing London with the greatest fury since the outset of the war. The historic Old Bailey was struck and burned. So was Dr. Samuel Johnson’s house off Fleet Street. Much of the old City was left a smoking ruin. Off Gresham and Basinghall streets, the restored timber roof of the ancient Guildhall, one of the administrative centers of London, was ablaze; the building dated back to 1411 and had survived the great fire of 1666 but now was little more than a charred shell. Although it was two o’clock in the morning and Nazi planes were perilously circling overhead, tens of thousands of Londoners turned on their radios and listened to Roosevelt. By the time he finished his fireside chat and was winding down by watching movies before going to bed, the White House was awash with telegrams—those supporting the speech outnumbered critical messages by a hundred to one.

  With this speech, and at his subsequent inauguration, Roosevelt seemed to be on the pinnacle of his political prestige and reputation. His rating in the polls had soared, and in 1939 and 1940, Congress had passed virtually every national security measure that he had requested. He had thwarted his critics in the Democratic Party and outmaneuvered his adversaries in the Republican Party. He had boldly reshuffled his cabinet and changed vice presidents. He had won a third term as president. He had deepened his relationship with Winston Churchill. And as he prepared to shepherd the Lend-Lease bill through Congress, his ability to wield influence on the national scene was every bit as great as it had been during the euphoria that surrounded him in 1933. Having done much to legitimize the national tendency toward no military action and no foreign wars, he now, in 1941, sought to entangle the nation’s military affairs with Britain’s, and above all to defeat the isolationists.

  Yet strangely, even then, not only did the nation still seem divided, but so did Roosevelt himself. On New Year’s Eve 1940, Churchill wrote: “Remember, Mr. President, we do not know what you have in mind, or exactly what United States is going to do, and we are fighting for our lives.”

  READING THESE WORDS, ROOSEVELT knew he somehow had to reassure Churchill. On January 19, he handed a private communiqué to Wendell Willkie, whom he had defeated in the election and was now asking to serve as an emissary to England. The message was to be passed privately to Churchill. Scrawled on the paper was a verse from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Building of the Ship,” which Roosevelt had jotted down from memory. In Britain, there was still snow on the ground when Churchill opened it and began to read.

  Dear Churchill,

  Wendell Willkie will give you this. He is truly helping to keep politics out over here.

  I think this verse applies to your people as it does to us.

  Sail on, O Ship of State!

  Sail on, Thou Union, strong and great!

  Humanity with all its fears,

  With all the hopes of future years,

  Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

  As ever yours,

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

  As the New Year began, Roosevelt still had to secure the passage of Lend-Lease, now in the form of a congressional bill, HR 1776. It was once said about the British Parliament that it could do anything except change a man into a woman; the same could have been said about the powers granted by HR 1776. The bill gave the president sweeping authority to exchange or lease or lend any article to any government. At the same time, the administration presented this not as a measure that would inevitably drag the United States into hostilities, but as a necessary measure if the nation wanted to stay out of Europe’s nightmare. Roosevelt’s critics didn’t believe him. “Never before has the United States,” the fiery Senator Burton Wheeler blustered over the radio, “given to one man the power to strip this nation of its defenses.” The influential Chicago Tribune agreed: “This is a bill for the destruction of the American Republic. It is a brief for an unlimited dictatorship with power over the possessions and lives of the American people.” However, it was Charles Lindbergh who provided the most prominent voice for the isolationists. Handsome, trim, charismatic, a popular hero who had bravely flown the Atlantic and held people the world over in his spell, he called on the United States to seek a negotiated peace, not pass a bill that would prolong the bloodshed on both sides of the Atlantic: “We are strong enough in this nation and in this hemisphere to maintain our own way of life regardless of . . . the other side.”

  As 1941 opened, the America First campaign was persistent; yet so was the interventionist Committee to Defend America. Both sides distributed bright little buttons, colored posters, and of course pamphlets. Both sides marched on Washington carrying their broadsides. Both sides testified before Congress and took to the radiowaves.

  In the end, the isolationists were no match for the president. After he applied all his influence, the Lend-Lease bill passed both houses by stunning majorities. As early as March, congressional opposition buckled. The public was with the president.

  But when Churchill called Lend-Lease “Hitler’s death warrant,” Hitler snickered.

  And then he prepared for his next move.

  DESPITE HAVING WEATHERED THE Battle of Britain, many in England continued to fear a cataclysmic Nazi assault across the Channel. And on the European Continent, the people of the Balkans also lived in terror of being seized in the Nazi fist coming their way. Indeed, if one looked at the map, it seemed just a matter of time before Hitler would grab Gibraltar or isolated Malta and then race across northern Africa and the Near East. Spain was under increasing pressure, and so was Greece. The Nazis continued to sink British and American vessels in the Atlantic at a terrifying pace—ships were being lost to German U-boats three times faster than American shipyards could replace them. Portugal and Turkey were threatening to join the Axis. Even Vichy France was being drawn more tightly into the Nazi orbit. It was as though Hitler were gleefully pushing rooks and bishops around a chessboard, while the Allies clung desperately to a handful of pawns. Step by step, Hitler had outflanked and suffocated his isolated adversaries. Step by step, he continued to spread the swastika from one nation to the next.

  On April 6, 1941, Hitler struck again, ordering a lightning assault on Yugoslavia and Greece. Despairing and confused, the two nations were nonetheless defiant. As the sun climbed into the sky over the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, Hitler told his army that the “hour is come,” and long columns of tanks and motorized troops rolled through the streets. The Luftwaffe strafed the defenseless capital while German ground forces took Skopje, and then they set their sights on the undefended Monastir Gap, the gateway to Greece. From his pillbox, one defiant Greek general boasted, “We will hold them with our teeth,” but teeth, or guns, or courage for that matter, were hardly adequate. Fourteen German divisions quickly massed against the defenders. The western world, including the United States, could not help admiring the courage of the Greeks, which recalled that of the ancient Gre
ek city-states. But the Greeks were outmatched and outgunned as waves of German forces kept coming. In distress, the Greek cabinet fled to Cairo. For their part, British army units mounted a stiff defense, but to little avail. Soon they and the Greek units alike were retreating south along one-lane mountain roads choked with smoking vehicles and mud. On April 17, 1941, Yugoslavia surrendered. In under a week, so did Greece. In a telling omen, the Germans discovered a scrawl in chalk on one building, “After Thermopylae, the three hundred were killed.” Actually, the casualties here were, of course, much worse; 17,000 people lay dead and the Germans took 300,000 Yugoslav prisoners and 270,000 Greeks. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia, where partisans were strung up on lampposts, was carved into pieces; portions were handed over to Germany’s allies, Hungary, Italy, and Bulgaria, while client regimes were formed in Serbia and Croatia.

  There seemed to be no end to Hitler’s cruel appetite. Next came a German blitzkrieg from the air against Crete: 16,000 paratroopers and camouflaged mountain soldiers and 1,200 planes swooped down on the island’s dumbstruck defense forces. It was a stunning measure, the first full air assault in modern military history. The Greek forces on the island and their British allies tenaciously fought back. They hit the Germans with whatever they could—hundreds of Germans were killed in the air and on land—but they too were ultimately outnumbered and overwhelmed. By the end of the month, Crete belonged to the Nazis. Having now conquered the eastern Mediterranean, Hitler was expected to set his sights on the oil-rich Middle East. And as Churchill informed Roosevelt, the loss of Egypt and the Middle East would entail incalculable risks.

  In this situation, Roosevelt countered the Nazis as best he could. For the moment, America’s military was still weak, its reach still limited. On May 3, Churchill, fretful after having witnessed defeat after defeat, directly asked Roosevelt to intervene—Churchill wanted the United States to join the war as a “belligerent power.” Roosevelt only counseled patience and deflected the request. Instead, he once again sought to reassure the prime minister that the United States was trying to do everything “that we possibly can” to help Great Britain. On May 10, the same evening that the president was composing this reply, five hundred German bombers inflicted their worst damage to date, destroying huge tracts of London including the symbol of British democracy itself: the House of Commons; even the venerated statue of Richard the Lionhearted was reduced to ruins. While the wreckage was still smoking, Churchill, his head sunk in despair, waded into the rubble and wept.

  Meanwhile, the president pushed and prodded, employing both exhortation and threats. But in Berlin, Hitler and the Nazis were unmoved. To the Führer, Roosevelt was a demented cripple, lacking the guts to lead the American people into war and the stomach to endure mass casualties. Whatever threats and speeches the president may have been making, they rang hollow. When Roosevelt issued a “proclamation of unlimited national emergency” at the end of May 1941, Hitler dismissed it as bluster. Hitler could read a map as well as anyone, and the map showed how the world’s most powerful democracy, which was calling on smaller nations to resist being swallowed up by the mighty German armies, was itself protected by the buffer of the Atlantic Ocean. Hitler as well as his translators could listen, and they all knew about American isolationism. And they knew that the American president had not asked for repeal of the Neutrality Act, that he had not requested heightened war authority, and that he continued to insist that the war be won “by keeping the existence of the main defense of the democracies going—and, that is England.” Finally, Hitler knew that America had simply watched as the Germans infiltrated Bulgaria and crashed across Yugoslavia and Greece.

  In truth, Roosevelt was intending to prepare public opinion inch by inch for eventual hostilities. He was preparing to quietly meet with Churchill on two battleships off the coast of Newfoundland and was endorsing secret joint conversations between the American and British military staff.

  But absent decisive action, the Führer remained emboldened and unintimidated.

  MEMBERS OF ROOSEVELT’S ADMINISTRATION also doubted the president. Roosevelt’s strategy, they thought, was one of neither war nor peace. And some continued to wonder if Britain could survive the unremitting German onslaught. “It has been as if living in a nightmare,” Averell Harriman wrote to Harry Hopkins, “with some calamity hanging constantly over one’s head.” Behind the president’s back, his most senior lieutenants schemed to push Roosevelt into doing more. Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, sat down with the president and insisted that he show more moral leadership, take more firm action, put more resolve behind his words. To Stimson, the president seemed “tangled up.” And Henry Morgenthau trenchantly observed, “The president is loath to get into this war. He would rather follow public opinion than lead it.” Roosevelt himself confessed to his cabinet that he was “not willing to fire the first shot.” And, having repeatedly said America would stay out of the war, he also admitted, “I am waiting to be pushed into the situation.”

  Until an actual push came, Roosevelt would remain noncommittal. But for the time being, Hitler was unwilling to take the bait; Nazi ships even refrained from overly provocative acts against the Americans in the Atlantic.

  And for Roosevelt, remaining noncommittal meant remaining noncommittal to everyone—the English, the Mediterranean nations, soon the Soviet Union, and of course, the embattled Jews of Europe.

  8

  Mills of the Gods

  IN THE SPRING OF 1941, while Roosevelt was searching for a strategic path, Adolf Hitler found one. Hitler, a product of boiling rage, of recklessness and raw vision, refused to let the Nazi armies stand still before the German conquest was total. Hunched over his desk in the Chancellery, he had nearly absolute power. Between bedtime and breakfast, he could, by arching an eyebrow or waving a hand, alter the fate of millions of people, unseat ancient monarchies or overthrow heads of state, or leave a countryside scorched and cities in flames. On a whim, he could allow a country to live—or call for a whole race to be killed. He had instincts of a tyrant. He was also convinced that he and he alone had the instincts of a statesman, and the tactical sense of an unconquerable general. He cowed everyone around him—his increasingly narrow inner circle, Göring, Goebbels, and Himmler, who were his sycophants; his ally, Mussolini, who was indulged but little more than an afterthought: and the figureheads of the conquered satellite nations, who were treated like naughty children.

  Territory controlled by the Axis powers, 1941.

  His generals, all professional men, should have been different. They weren’t. Time after time, as he harangued his military leaders about politics, history, and strategy, they stood silent, in awe of the Führer. Hadn’t he resuscitated Germany’s fortunes? Hadn’t he taken the nation out of the depths of despair and vaulted it to the zenith of power? Hadn’t he shown how to blend propaganda with diplomacy, and then exert pressure from the air and power on the ground? It was perhaps no surprise, then, that at the end of March 1941, when Hitler gathered his generals to hear another of his tirades, “they sat there before him,” as one observer recalled, “in stubborn silence, a silence broken only twice”—when those assembled raised their hands in salute as the Führer swept in through a rear door, and afterward when he departed. The generals did not voice any objections. Remarkably, they did not utter a single word.

  They should have. For before May began, Hitler finalized one of his most stunning decisions of the conflict: to open up a two-front war. On June 22, Nazi forces would launch an all-out assault against the Soviet Union. Intoxicated by his previous success, Hitler was sure nothing could stop them. “We have only to kick in the door,” he screeched to his staff, “and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down.” A mesmerized Goebbels agreed: “Bolshevism will collapse,” he thought, “like a house of cards.”

  The decision had been under review for months. On its face, it was sheer madness. For one thing it meant double-crossing his ally; as recently as November 12, the flag of the Sov
iet Union—the red-and-yellow hammer and sickle—had fluttered alongside the swastika in the Reich’s capital when the Nazis received a Soviet delegation to discuss carving up large portions of the globe. Moreover, Hitler himself had once stated, in Mein Kampf, that one should never fight a two-front war. And his own generals insisted that the first lesson of military history was: “Don’t invade Russia.” And for good reason. Russia was a colossus with a thousand-mile frontier and a storied history of swallowing up would-be conquerors: the Ottoman Empire got nowhere against Catherine the Great, and Napoleon did little better against Czar Alexander.

  But where other invaders found Russia a merciless graveyard, the Führer saw possibilities. For Hitler, the opening of a second front was designed to be more than simply a turning point of the war. It was to be a final blow that would subjugate the despised Soviet Union, force Britain to sue for peace, and forestall America’s entry into the conflict. On paper, it seemed like a workable plan. Hitler’s army was the best in Europe; Stalin’s, after his repeated purges of his top generals, was seemingly the worst. In truth, both American and British generals believed the Red Army could fall in as little as six weeks once Hitler’s onslaught began. Also, Hitler’s plan included seizing the oil fields of the Caucasus, thereby giving Germany crucial resources to fight. And control of the Soviet Union would open up access not just to oil, but also to its other vast resources: wheat and agriculture from Ukraine, gas from Romania, even fruits from the Crimea. It would also provide slave labor for Germany. And it would give Hitler Lebensraum—living space—for the German people in the east. But could it be done?

  Many had doubted that Hitler could rout opposition parties in Germany, but hadn’t he done that? Few thought he could corral dissidents and Jews alike, but hadn’t he done that? And who could fail to be impressed by his nearly complete control of Europe from the English Channel to the Balkans? In fact, the more he had considered it, the more reasons he had to invade the Soviet Union now. Britain refused to be beaten, and remained a defiant force. For all his timidity, Roosevelt appeared to be paving the way for an eventual military confrontation and would be in a position, as Hitler himself acknowledged, “to intervene from 1942 onwards.” And though the Soviet Union remained a member of the Tripartite Pact, Hitler despised Bolsheviks and believed the Soviet Union was being ruled by “the international Jew.” He also was convinced that the Soviet Union was ripe for the picking, and he imagined that its suffering, superstitious people pined for the old days of the czars and were waiting for an opportunity to cast away the iron hand of the Bolsheviks.